Nokia released a press release today stating that they’re going to be “revising its definition of the industry mobile device market that it uses to estimate industry volumes”. The new definition will include “vendors of legitimate, as well as unlicensed and counterfeit, products with manufacturing facilities primarily centered around certain locations in Asia and other emerging markets”. Using the new definition applied to 2009 figures, Nokia says the industry shipped 1.26 billion units versus 1.14 billion. That’s 120 million devices they’ve previously unaccounted for, or in other words, more mobile phones with the word NOKLA on the front than what LG officially shipped in 2009. Nokia also said that using this new definition for mobile devices, their present market share is not 38%, but in fact “only” 34%.
The Finnish company has also tweaked their expectations for where the market is heading in 2010. They say industry volumes will be up 10% compared to 2009, that their market share will be flat, and that their “value share”, which is a term that’s only recently been starting to float around thanks to Apple’s small unit sales, yet ridiculously high profits, will be up slightly.
Considering Nokia predicted industry volumes for 2009 would be down 10%, and in reality the market was simply flat compared to 2008, this new 10% growth statistic is going to be on the low end of many analyst projections.