Kantar numbers show significant Windows Phone growth in Europe

Kantar has finished tallying up the market numbers for Q1 of 2015 and Microsoft seems to be doing quite well in Europe. Its Windows Phone mobile OS has shown an average overall growth of 1.8 points across EU markets. The number might not seem like much, but, considering that Apple's iOS boats the exact same increase, puts the achievement into perspective.

The analysis shows that the extra Windows Phone users come at the expense of the Android, which drops 3.1 points in the same markets. And, like we already mentioned, this is a trend across most of Europe. In France, for instance, Windows Phone has shown a staggering improvement of 5.8 points, whereas all other contenders have significantly declining market shares, over the same period last year.

On the vast Chinese market there are even greater fluctuations. According to Kantar, Android is down by as much as 8 points and, consequently iOS is up by a whopping 9.2 points. The trend is pretty much the same in Australia. In Japan, however, the score is reversed, with a 10.2 points growth for Android at the expense of a 12.5 points decline for iOS.

It is interesting to note that the increased popularity of Windows Phone seems to be confined to European markets. In the USA, for example, the OS in declining in market share, but Kantar does note that:

If we dig a little deeper, it is easy to see the strong value proposition that the Lumia portfolio offers, as Windows phone sales in the U.S. skew towards the prepay market (20%) and instalment plans (51%). Microsoft is betting that new Windows 10 functions and the ability for developers to easily port Android apps to Windows will make the Windows ecosystem more appealing.

And this is a very valid point, indeed. Microsoft's recently announced tactic to bring easier app porting from Android and iOS to its own ecosystem could reel in new developers and help increase the popularity of Windows Phone even further. Microsoft has also revealed that it has sold 8.6 million Windows Phone devices in Q1 2015, which is an 18% increase over the same period in 2014. Still, the company lost $4 million during the quarter, so there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Also, before the obligatory platform flame war starts up again in the comments, bear in mind, that while Kantar's results are generally quite accurate, statistics are often far from indicative of real world market trends, popularity and success.

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