WP7 will go second by 2015, iOS and BlackBerry will lose ground

The analysts from IDC just published their forecast on the smartphone market development in the next five years. Apparently the company has some sort of crystal ball as we can’t see how else they will be able to make such long-term predictions in such a dynamic market.

Anyway here’s what the company says: Windows Phone 7 should climb to a global number two spot in the next four years, after it reaches a market share of 5.5% in 2011. To do this WP7 will need to achieve an average growth of 67% per year until 2015, so it can overtake Symbian, BlackBerry and iOS in the smartphone ranking. The analysts see the partnership with Nokia as key to securing this impressive growth rate.

In the lead Android has little to worry about as it will be nearing a 40% market share over the course of this year. An increase in sales by 23.8% over each of the following four years will let it increase that even further to an estimated 45.4% in 2012 when Nokia is supposed to make its first large-scale move with WP7 devices.

Naturally a large part of those increases will come at the expense of Symbian, which will be rapidly losing ground in the years to come. The Nokia platform will be down to 20.9% before 2011 has ended and with a 0.2% market share, Symbian will be virtually non-existent in 2015.

The sales of iOS and BlackBerry devices will be growing by 17.1% a year and 18.8% a year respectively until 2015, but that would actually mean they are underperforming the market. That will lead to a slight slip in their market shares - iOS will be running on 15.3% of all smartphones in 2015, while BlackBerry OS will only be powering 13.7%.

Obviously IDC doesn’t see any major new players entering the smartphone market anytime soon. Existing ones such as Bada and webOS are also obviously still going to struggle to make an impact. This is another thing that we find hard to believe considering that Bada has the backing of the world’s second largest manufacturer.

Still if you aren’t as skeptical as us and believe such five-year forecasts could hold any water you might want to buy some Google or Microsoft shares. Those should pay off handsomely if the IDC predictions turn out true.

Note: The last column in the table stands for Compound annual growth rate. This is basically the average increase (or decrease) in sales expected for each of the upcoming years.

Source