In a sign of the changing times, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is on the brink of passing Nokia’s feature phone sales with sales of its iPhone smartphone. The figures released today by Strategy Analytics are important not only because of Nokia’s historical interest as one of the world’s largest mobile phone sellers for close to half a century, but because they ring the knell of an entire form factor of electronics.
Nokia sold 47 million telephones in total during a quarter in which Apple (AAPL) sold 43.7 million. All of Apple’s sales were iPhones, while Nokia’s sales were mostly feature phones and encompassed a large range of different models. These ranged as low as $60 new in price, meaning that sales were declining even for those mobile phones far cheaper than the famous Apple flagship product.
Not only are the sales figures quite close together, they are on a trajectory which will cause them to pass soon if something unexpected does not reverse the trend. Nokia’s sales were down a startling 15 million units over the previous quarter, while Apple’s sales rose by over 6 million units. “Hemorrhaging” is almost too weak a word to describe the magnitude of Nokia’s sales collapse. The Finnish firm may well be on its last legs, swept away by the tide of change and forces larger than it can hope to adapt to or control.
Nokia was a groundbreaking company in the field of mobile telecommunications, and was in fact the firm that created and refined GSM. The company was heavily involved in building the infrastructure that later companies, including Apple, have since built on. Today, it is scrambling to make acquisitions that will save it from failure, but the latest sales figures do not indicate that these maneuvers have thus far enjoyed much success.
The significance of this quietly announced piece of news should not be underestimated. Feature phones, which are plain cell phones without touchscreens or any of the other advanced bells and whistles of smartphones, have consistently outsold the more high-tech (and expensive) communications devices in the past.
However, the fact that the iPhone is on the edge of outselling all of Nokia’s feature phones put together heralds the demise of this kind of telephone. The “feature phone,” more than likely, will soon be as extinct as automobiles that need to be hand-cranked to start them or computers running only DOS. The smartphone will soon be ubiquitous – until its day comes to be eclipsed by some new and exciting communications device.
