Kantar:10% of new Android customers come from Windows Phone

Kantar has released its smartphone market share numbers for the 3 months till April 2016.

It is of course no surprise that the market share of the Windows Phone OS has continued to dip, hitting new lows in France at 3.6% and USA at 1.3%. In fact more surprising is that the handsets continue to sell in UK where it has 5.8% market share and Germany where it has 5.9%. Overall EU5 market share is at 4.8%, down from 9.3% last year and 4.9% last month.

In the EU5, Android accounted for 76% of smartphone sales, up 5.8 percentage points from 70.2% in the three months ending April 2015, taking most of its gains from Windows Phone and some from iOS.

“Android’s gains continued in several regions including the EU5, US, and China, but the rate of growth has slowed,” said Lauren Guenveur, Consumer Insight Director for Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. “In the EU5, year-on-year growth between March 2015 and 2016 was 7.1%. For the April-to-April time frame, that number dropped to 5.8% pts. What’s more, we see only a 0.4 percentage point increase for the three months ending March 2016, up from 75.6% to 76%.”

“In Great Britain, both Android and iOS had higher market share in the three months ending April 2016. Android represented 58.5% of the market in that period, a gain of 4.1% year-on-year,” said Dominic Sunnebo, Business Unit Director for Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Europe. “And for iOS, this term showed the first increase since October 2015, though modest at just 0.4%, from 34.7% to 35.1%.

It appears Android is the OS of choice for Windows Phone users migrating from the OS.

“Android gains came from Windows phone owners switching, a trend that produced nearly 10% of new Android customers, while 21.8% of new iOS buyers switched from Android,” Sunnebo said.

Guenveur added that outside of USA most Android growth has been a result of movement either from the Windows ecosystem or a feature phones.

“In Europe and the US, the smartphone market is approaching saturation, and future successes for either of the two dominant ecosystems will come chiefly from drawing customers away from the other,” Guenveur continued. “With Windows phones exiting the market, this battle will only intensify.”

See Kantar’s full numbers below:

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