Nokia’s once cluttered mobile trophy cabinet hasn’t had much silverware to boast of in recent years — as the company has been moving from its legacy smartphone OS to Microsoft’sWindows Phone — shedding massive amounts of marketshare in the process, and watching fleet-of-foot Android OEMs expand to fill the gap. Despite this smartphone switch,Nokia has continued to sell a lot of basic mobile phones — running its S40 OS (it shipped 76.6 million mobiles in its Q3, for instance) – which has helped it stay on top of the annual global cellphone rankings. But no longer.

IHS says Samsung is expected to account for approaching a third (29 percent) of worldwide mobile shipments in 2012, up from 24 percent in 2011. While Nokia’s share this year is expected to drop to 24 percent, down from 30 percent last year — ergo it’s pretty much like a straight marktet share swap. Apple is third in IHS’ preliminary 2012 forecast, predicted to take 10 percent of the market this year. The analyst notes that its the first time Samsung has achieved top billing in the mobile table — although Nokia has been the runner-up before — back in 1998.

Smartphones are the fastest-growing segment of the cellphone market — accounting for nearly half of all wireless handset shipments for all of 2012 — and with Android and Samsungtaking the lion’s share of smartphone sales per quarter (Android took a 75 percent of the global share in Q3, according to IDC) it’s no surprise the Korean mobile giant finally gets to take the overall, annual mobile crown too.

IHS predicts global smartphone shipments will rise by 35.5 percent this year, while overall cellphone shipments are expected to rise by only around 1 percent. This rapid smartphonegrowth will push 2012 smartphone penetration to 47 percent, up from 35 percent in 2011, it predicts.

IHS says Samsung’s success has been built on its ‘fast follower’ strategy for design and manufacturing — which sees it fire out myriad devices across the price spectrum to build volume. The analyst said it expects Samsung’s share of global smartphone shipments to rise 8 points to 28 percent this year, up from 20 percent in 2011. In contrast, it said Nokia will suffer the biggest decrease: with its share forecast to plunge by 11 points to 5 percent in 2012, down from 16 percent in 2011.

Source: Techcrunch

Well it was pretty much expected that Nokia's market share will sunk even in standard phones as they make the painful switch to new OS. Next year will be the real test as they get Windows into their lower range models too.

Lower range Android phones will always out sell low range Windows phone.  Nokia should have went with Android and not Windows.  They are becoming like RIM.

And you base this on what? There hasn't yet been lower range models with Windows OS. This will change with Nokia as sales of low range phones are important to them.

Nokia will be fine, they're doing everything right at the moment. They're pretty dominant in Asia and they've struck a lucrative deal with China Telecom to sell the Lumia 920T, and as they introduce windows on more models they'll help spur the growth of Windows Phone. They're on the rise again, their share price has gone up over 100% since the Summer.

This was bound to happen could have been achieved sooner.

Nokia stock is almost up 100% from where it was 3 months ago. Just sayin'...

Android cannot save Nokia, that is why they went to Windows Phone OS. How many manucturers do really get profits from Android?

One. Samsung makes more money off Android than Google does. Sooner or later, that's going to lead to a confrontation

You might also count HTC, because while they haven't exactly been making money, they haven't been losing it either. 

Isn't the Android OS basically free? How is that not preferable to Windows, which presumably is not?