Nokia soars to #11 smartphone brand globally

Tech analyst Neil Shah went on a tweet storm yesterday on the topic of the 2017 comeback of the Nokia brand. Shah is a partner at Counterpoint, a Hong Kong-based industry analysis firm, and although his info was dropping in the form of tweets, he clarified that the tweets were the latest official Counterpoint numbers.

The basic gist of Counterpoint’s research is this: Nokia killed it in 2017.

In the year-and-a-half since HMD Global started selling Nokia-branded phones, the brand has gone from zero to 11^th place in the smartphone market. In Q4 of 2017, Nokia sold more smartphones than Google, HTC, Sony, Alcatel, Lenovo, Asus, and OnePlus.

Outside of smartphones, Nokia is also the #1 brand of feature phones, dominating the market with 20.7 million units sold in the last three months of 2017.

Combining the smartphone totals and the feature phone totals, HMD Global ends up in sixth place in the mobile industry with a 5% share of the total market. That puts the company just under OPPO, which has 6.8% of the market. For some perspective, OPPO was in 4^th place at 8.2% of the market at the end of Q3 2017, so it is the one feeling the Nokia heat the most.

Not too bad for a company that is, on paper anyway, only about a year old.

HMD Global snagged the rights to sell Nokia-branded smartphones in 2016, only months after Microsoft offloaded part of Nokia to a subsidiary of Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn). In 2017, the very first Nokia-branded Android device hit shelves, and clearly, momentum is just building and building.

HMD Global promises some surprises at Mobile World Congress 2018, which takes place in a few weeks.