Overview of the Russian smartphone market (according to MTS)

MTS, one of the largest Russian telecom operators, and more recently one of the largest retailers, has published data on the Russian smartphone market for the whole of 2011. 

In physical terms, the volume of the smartphone market has more than doubled over the year, – MTS specialists report in their report. – If in 2010 it was about 3.77 million devices, then by the end of 2011 the number of devices increased to 7.7 million. 

Moreover, only in the 4th quarter of 2011, the number of smartphones sold increased by 61% compared to the same period of 2010. The growth compared to the 3rd quarter of 2011 was also significant – 22%. So, according to the results of the 4th quarter, a small miracle happened – for the first time, the share of smartphones in monetary terms accounted for more than half of the mobile market market – 53.3%. However, in terms of the number of devices sold, smartphones occupied slightly less than a quarter of the mobile market in the 4th quarter. The annual result is even smaller – smartphones have “only” 19% of the market. 

In monetary terms, the annual volume of the smartphone market in 2011 amounted to 83.3 billion rubles, which is 80% more than in 2010. 

Unfortunately, MTS did not provide information on the distribution of the market between mobile platforms. On the other hand, it is still known how the Russian smartphone market is distributed among vendors: 

Based on these data, it can be assumed that by the end of 2011, about 30%-40% of the market fell on Android devices; 6.1% on iOS; the share of 35-40% remained with Symbian, and the remaining market fell on Bada, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.  

The full MTS report can be found here.