Over 66mn SIM cards in use in Thailand: Survey

Released on Jan 10, the study showed that while Nokia still leads in terms of market share for mobile phones, competitors such as RIM are closing in on the race for ultimate supremacy in the smartphone arena. Driven by the diverse profile and needs of users, the smartphone battle also extends to mobile operators as they are looking for ways to differentiate. Along with the exponential growth in smartphone ownership and usage, this presents opportunities for retailers and consumer goods manufacturers as well.

“The direction is very clear: consumers are jumping fast onto the smartphone bandwagon for a variety of activities beyond simple communications.  This opens up significant opportunities not only for players in the telecommunications industry, but also for companies with a major consumer focus as well” said William Wang, director of Nielsen’s Telecommunications Practice Group in Thailand.

“With a 27 per cent and 70 per cent penetration rate of smartphone (a mobile phone that enables users to install applications) and non-smartphone amongst consumers in Thailand, it is crucial for manufacturers, operators and retailers to understand the immensely diverse landscape of mobile phone users in the country to leverage this trend and win in the rapidly changing industry.”

Key findings of the study:

Nokia still enjoys the highest market share of all mobile phone types (48 per cent) but its conversion rate lags RIM BlackBerry

Nokia’s dominance of Thailand’s mobile phone market continues, with the manufacturer holding on to the biggest slice (48 per cent) of market share across all phone types, followed by Samsung (15 per cent) and iMobile (10 per cent), according to Nielsen’s latest analysis.

However, a deeper look into the category reveals a slightly different story:  Samsung is now in the lead in Multimedia Phone (a non-smartphone with touch screen and/or QWERTY keyboard) with a 35 percent market share, while RIM BlackBerry is rapidly rising through the smartphone ranks, stalking Nokia with a 26 percent share.

Despite Nokia being rated as the most preferred brand by 69 percent of Thais - a truly impressive figure compared to other brands’ (single digit percentage) except for Apple (11 per cent), RIM BlackBerry enjoyed the highest conversion rate of 77 per cent, meaning 7.7 people out of ten wanting to buy a BlackBerry would eventually buy it.

Fifty three per cent of respondents across all age groups in Thailand still opted for Nokia. The brand sailed effortlessly to the top amongst respondents over 45 years old, with 80 percent ranking the brand as their most favourite. However, Nokia faced heavy competition from Apple when it came to a 16 to 24 years old age group, winning the tight race only by a slim 7 percent.

Amongst major operators, AIS had the biggest share of Nokia users at a 51 per cent, while DTAC and TrueMove both enjoyed higher portion of RIM BlackBerry and Apple users in their networks.

Despite securing five out of ten most popular smartphone models, none of Nokia’s phone was in the top three. The most coveted position was led by RIM’s BlackBerry 8500 Curve at a 13 per cent share, followed by an Apple iPhone 4 (8 per cent), and RIM’s BlackBerry 9700 Bold (7 per cent).

While Symbian was undoubtedly the most-used Operating System with Nokia’s significant market share on smartphone (48 per cent), Android OS was the most well known (58 per cent).

In terms of application download, 8 out of 10 Thais would only install free applications. The average expenditure on applications is Bt22.2 across most brands. However, Apple users were spending more than twice of the amount.

Games was the type of application most downloaded (37 per cent) with Apple users the most active gamers, spending an averagely of 1.5 days playing games on their phones in a month. Social Networking applications, on the other hand, were the most-used applications, with Facebook dominating the scene at a complete 100 per cent usage. .