Smartphone report
INDUSTRY PRIMER
Smart phones...smarter investments
Ten themes for a new era of growth
1) Addressable market for smartphones is 1.5 billion, 21.5% penetrated
2) Smartphones will continue to take both volume and value share
3) Corporate smartphone market is merely 7% penetrated
4) A significant shift to lower price points is likely
5) There are seven key attributes needed to win in smartphones
6) Competition and margins – expect intensity as new entrants emerge
7) There will be winners and losers in the market
8) 3G to soon penetrate the low-end of the handset market
9) Services – who has a strategy?
10) MIDs and Netbooks unlikely to cannibalize smartphones for now
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Smartphone growth accelerating. We raise our 2009 and 2010
smartphone unit estimates by 11% and 19% to 176mn (+26% yoy) and
223mn (+27% yoy) to reflect changes to our proprietary affordability based
addressable market analysis, which factors in TCO, income distribution,
and GDP, as well as to incorporate our analysis of the corporate
smartphone market, which suggests penetration of that segment is only
7%. We believe smartphones represent one of the most attractive secular
trends in technology, given our projected long-term compound annual
growth rate of 18% (2008-2015).
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CS scorecard to determine winners and losers. To judge the key
players, we have developed a scorecard based on seven factors (software,
services, product, brand, distribution, IPR, and chipset efficiency) we think
are needed for smartphone success. We conclude that secular share
gainers will be Apple, RIM, and possibly Palm. Nokia’s 45% smartphone
share is likely to decline given slow progress in software and services, and
other vendors, including HTC, LG, Samsung, and SEMC, could struggle
due to less focused software strategies and weak distribution.
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Upgrade RIM and Motorola, maintain Outperform on Palm,
downgrade Nokia and Qualcomm. Given pure play exposure to
smartphones, and sustainable market share and margins through FY11,
we upgrade RIM to Outperform (new target: $95). For Motorola (new
target: $9.50), our view that a break up story could re-emerge as the
Devices segment approaches breakeven by late 2010, even with modest
success of upcoming smartphones, leads us to upgrade to Outperform.
Palm remains at Outperform with an unchanged target of $18, and we
downgrade Nokia to Underperform (new target: