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Symbian Fast Facts Q4 2007

The company: Symbian Limited    

Website: www.symbian.com

CEO: Nigel Clifford

Offices
Symbian’s headquarters are based in London, United Kingdom, with offices in the United Kingdom, United States and Asia (Bangalore, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo)

Founded: 1998

Number of employees: 1409

Shareholders:
Ericsson (15.6%), Nokia (47.9%), Panasonic (10.5%), Samsung (4.5%), Siemens (8.4%) and Sony Ericsson (13.1%)

The product: Symbian OS™

Core business:
Symbian creates and licenses Symbian OS, the market leading open operating system for mobile phones

User interfaces designed for Symbian OS include Nokia’s S60, NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP user interface for the FOMA™ 3G network and UIQ, designed by UIQ Technology, a joint venture between Motorola and Sony Ericsson

Licensees:

Mobile phone manufacturers that shipped Symbian smartphones in Q4 2007 are Fujitsu, LG Electronics, Motorola, Mitsubishi Electric, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp and Sony Ericsson

Significant Symbian Facts & Figures

Market leader

As of 31 December 2007:

  • 22.4 million Symbian smartphones shipped by licensees in Q4 2007 up 53% from Q4 2006
  • 77.3 million Symbian smartphones shipped to consumers worldwide in 2007, up 50% from 2006
  • Symbian’s share of the overall mobile phone market grew from 5% in 2006 to 7% in 2007
    (Strategy Analytics)
  • 188 new million cumulative Symbian smartphones shipped since the formation of Symbian
  • 68 Symbian smartphone models commercially available in 2007 up 4.6% from 2006
  • 8,736 third-party Symbian applications commercially available, an increase of 27% on Q4 2006

Consumer technology benchmarks

  • 300 million mobile phones shipped in Q4 2007[1]
  • 1.12 billion mobile phones sold in 2007 according to Strategy Analytics[2] 
  • 110 million laptops shipped in 2007, 33.8% growth from 2006[3]
  • 160 million desktop computers shipped in 2007, 4.3% growth from 2006[4]
  • 2.3 million iPhones shipped in the quarter ending December 2007[5]
  • 22.1 million iPods shipped in the quarter ending December 2007[6]
  • 1.65 million BlackBerry subscriber accounts and 3.9 million devices shipped in the quarter ending December 2007[7]
  • 64 million active Facebook users, an average of 250,000 new registrations per day since January 2007[8]

Nine years of innovation and milestones 

2007

Symbian announces new technologies for the future of converged device development including FreeWay, ScreenPlay and Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP)
2006 100 million Symbian smartphones shipped
2005 Symbian OS v9 announced with Platform Security and support for single core processors, WebCore and JavaScriptCore components of Apple's Safari™ browser
2004 Symbian OS selected by NTT DoCoMo as software platform for 3G FOMA™ handsets
2003 Symbian smartphones support mobile payments in Japan, first Motorola smartphone on UIQ A920, Samsung becomes a shareholder
2002 First smartphone on UIQ – Sony Ericsson P800, Siemens and Sony Ericsson become shareholders
2001 First open Symbian smartphone - Nokia 9210 Communicator - and first GPRS, camera smartphone - Nokia 7650
2000 First touch-screen phone - Ericsson R380 on Symbian OS v5
1999 Symbian and NTT DoCoMo sign R&D agreement to develop smartphones for Japan, Matsushita (Panasonic) becomes a shareholder
1998 Symbian founded by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Psion

Developer highlights

  • A thriving global Symbian developer population supported by developer programs such as Symbian Developer Network, Forum Nokia, UIQ, SEMC Developer world and MotoDev and increasingly expanding into countries such as China, Japan, India and the US
  • 8,736 third-party Symbian applications commercially available, an increase of 27% on Q4 2006
  • 2,584 third-party Symbian applications released to market in 2007 with a total of 10,362 applications, including commercial, freeware, open source and shareware, released since 2002
  • Symbian OS opens to non-mobile developer community with P.I.P.S.
  • 83,000 unique users of the Symbian Developer Network website every month in Q4 2007
  • Over 70,000 downloads of the Symbian OS Getting Started guide in the 2007
  • 400% growth in hits to developer.symbian.com in 2007
  • Free developer environment, Carbide.c++ Express for entry level developers
  • 282 applications were Symbian Signed - a testing and signing program for Symbian applications and content - in Q4 2007; 3,655 applications have been Symbian Signed since 2004

Symbian Academy highlights

  • Since its formation in June 2006, Symbian Academy has collaborated with 44 universities, 19 added in 2007 alone, in 17 countries as far as China, Ethiopia, India, Kuwait, Lebanon, Russia, Thailand and the United States
  • In 2007, Symbian Academy launched a jobs board for Symbian partners and licensees to post jobs for Symbian Academy students
  • Symbian Academy professors have developed innovative applications and programs including pollution monitoring and mapping on GPS enabled Symbian smartphones

Operator success

Dec 2007 Symbian smartphones selling through more than 250 major network operators worldwide
Feb 2007 Telefónica Móviles España selects Symbian OS for future roll-out of smartphones and services
Feb 2007 Telecom Italia selects S60 software on Symbian OS
Feb 2007­­ Nokia announced a collaboration to strengthen T-Mobile's capabilities to bring core services to market and improve the capability of S60 licensees to develop devices for T-Mobile
Nov 2006 3 launches the X-Series first for devices based on UIQ and S60 on Symbian OS
Oct 2006 Orange specified S60 on Symbian OS as a platform of choice to accelerate Orange device customization, shorten time-to-market and accelerate application development
Oct 2006 AT&T formerly known as Cingular Wireless launched Symbian Zone on Cingular devCentral to provide Cingular Deluxe developers with early online access to the latest Symbian OS library for application developers
Feb 2006 Vodafone and Nokia collaborate to increase the use of S60 on Symbian OS as a standard software platform
Nov 2004 NTT DoCoMo selects Symbian OS as one of its primary smartphone development platforms

Japan success

  • 30 million phones based on Symbian OS have shipped in Japan up until the end of November 2007
  • Symbian OS smartphone market share in Japan was 61.6% (37.9% Linux) in Q4 2007 (Canalys)
  • A total of 69 Symbian smartphone models have been launched in Japan by Symbian customers Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Nokia, Sharp and Sony Ericsson, up to 31 December 2007
  • Six Symbian customers cumulatively shipped 20 million Symbian smartphones by the end of Q1 2007 – it took three years to ship the first 10 million units, and only one year to ship the next 10 million.
  • In November 2004, NTT DoCoMo selected Symbian OS as one of its primary smartphone development platforms
  • The first Symbian smartphone shipped in Japan in January 2003

China success

  • Symbian was the leading OS for smartphones in China with a market share of 68.7% (25.2% Linux) in Q4 2007 (Canalys)
  • The smartphone market in China is set to grow substantially, with forecast shipments projected to reach 29 million units by 2009[9]
  • 14 companies have joined the Symbian Platinum Partner Program since its formation in China in H1 2007
  • Nine Chinese universities have joined the Symbian Academy
  • In January 2007 Symbian expanded its sales and marketing presence in Beijing and in August, opened a global R&D center as part of its global R&D strategy (the center is Symbian’s fourth R&D site with the others located in the United Kingdom and India)
  • In November 2007 Symbian completed the transfer of management and software engineers from MoGenesis

USA success

  • Symbian partners with over 100 North American companies including Dolby, Google, IBM, McAfee, Oracle, RIM, Symantec and Sling Media
  • In H2 2007, the US was one of the top two regions to produce the most number of commercially available applications for Symbian smartphones
  • US audio technology company Dolby Laboratories, debuted its Dolby Mobile technology on the Symbian OS based NTT DoCoMo FOMA™ SH905i which began shipping in November 2007
  • Nokia N95 US variant began shipping offering North American 3G/HSDPA/UMTS compatibility and included new specifications such as A-GPS, extended battery life and 124MB RAM in September 2007
  • During H1 2007, retailers Dell, Gateway and Mobile Planet began selling Symbian smartphones (Nokia N95, Nokia E61i, Nokia E65, Nokia N76) direct to consumers

Analyst Statistics

The following information is based on analyst house independent research and statistics.

Strategy Analytics:

"Vendors are measuring success in the smart device market on their ability to drive consumption of rich media content and applications for the consumer. The scale of the opportunity is immense with Strategy Analytics predictingthat in 2008 and 2009 combined, 500 million smart devices will be sold globally, more than have been sold cumulatively since the beginning of the decade. This growth will be heavily dependent on selling these rich media smart devices to consumers who are still discovering the value in these devices beyond messaging.  Device vendors who win the lion's share of these sales will successfully raise the bar in the areas of content usability and presentation while leveraging the broadband capabilities of 3G technologies.  While other OS suppliers have their niche, none is further in serving this wider market than Symbian.  With technologies such as ScreenPlay and Freeway, Symbian OS will enable the consumption of rich media on smart devices for the next generation of consumer demand." Chris Ambrosio, Strategy Analytics, Jan 2008.

In-Stat: Smartphone Sales will grow at a rate of more than 30% a year for the next five years

"Because of the value users are finding, organizations are slowly taking ownership of smartphones and data applications used for business purposes. Rather than having over complicated reimbursement plans, more organizations are finding it more expedient and economical to treat wireless voice and data services as a business expense when they use smartphones." Bill Hughes, In-Stat, Nov 2007.

Yankee Group

"Smartphone platform vendors' continuing investment in performance and cost optimization, developer and integration tools, and innovative licensing models has tipped the mass-market volume inflection point. Symbian has led this trend. At the current rate of innovation and proliferation, the open OS segment will surpass the 1 billion cumulative sell-through mark by 2011. At this time, smartphones will comprise over 20% of all handset volumes.

It's increasingly obvious that proprietary, or organically incubated OS platform strategies are far too costly and time consuming for vendors to develop in a market where cellular and consumer electronics, and the enterprise and consumer applications they support, are becoming one. Symbian OS boasts proven commercial success across form factors, segments, and use cases. It is almost a certainty that Symbian will continue to leading this trend due to its stability, maturity, strong global presence and growing vendor support. Still, between RIM, Symbian, Microsoft, and a host of Linux providers, the market is not zero-sum. Yankee believes the primary growth driver for smartphones is the economic benefit to manufacturers and operators associated with standardized, scalable software architectures. The best platforms will anticipate the multi-faceted nature of the demand side, which includes both operators and consumers. Vendors and operators will enjoy rapid time to market at low cost with services and devices that span the entirety of the market, from basic phones to ultra-high multimedia centric models." John Jackson, Vice President, Enabling Technologies Research, Yankee Group, Jan 2008

Canalys

Analyst firm Canalys forecasts that cumulative global shipments of smartphones will pass the one billion mark by 2012. "We are still at an early stage of market development, with businesses and consumers only scratching the surface of what is and will be possible with such devices.”  With the rapid increase in demand for new features and services, smartphones are migrating into the higher volume, mid-range market segments. Symbian accessed this market successfully in 2006 and increased its volume of smartphones selling at mid-range prices*. In Q406 4.5 million Symbian smartphones shipped at mid-range price points, an 86% share of the mid-range smartphone market.” Pete Cunningham, senior analyst at Canalys.

* Includes Linux 'closed' phones in Asia and excludes PDAs

[1] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS21053908
[2] http://www.strategyanalytics.net/default.aspx?mod
[3] IDC Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, December 2007
[4] IDC Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, December 2007
[5] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/01/22results.html
[6] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/01/22results.html
[7] http://www.rim.com/news/press/2007/pr-20_12_2007-01.shtml
[8] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[9] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics – Worldwide Smart Mobile Device Market
[10] http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9816072-7.html

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