On Wednesday morning, Frank Shaw, the head of public relations at Microsoft, published a blog post tallying Microsoft’s progress across several different product areas, including Windows Phone, its operating system for smartphones.
One of the factoids in Mr. Shaw’s post â€" that Windows Phone is outshipping iPhone in seven countries â€" garnered notice from John Gruber at Daring Fireball, who wondered about the identities of the seven countries.
I wondered, too, so I asked IDC, the research firm behind the stats in Mr. Shaw’s post, to elaborate. Windows Phone has struggled to gain traction in the market against Apple’s iPhone and phones running Google’s Android operating system, so it’s noteworthy for Microsoft that its product is outshining Apple in a few parts of the globe.
According to Kevin Restivo, an analyst at IDC, the countries where Windows Phone shipments exceeded those of iPhone during the fourth quarter were: Argentina, India, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Ukraine. A seventh “country†where Windows Phone shipments beat iPhone is actually a group of smaller countries, including Croatia, that IDC lumps together in a category called “rest of central and eastern Europe.â€
Mr. Restivo provided some context, though, that slightly diminishes the scale of Microsoft’s success in those countries. Three of the markets â€" Ukraine, South Africa and “rest of central and eastern Europe†â€" are small enough that there were fewer than 100,000 Windows Phone unit shipments in the fourth quarter in each of them.
IDC’s numbers also reflect only the official number of cellphones imported into the countries. Mr. Restivo said that in some countries, like Argentina, high government taxes mean there is a very significant gray market in cellphones, which IDC doesn’t track. So it is hard to know actual market share in those places.
Mr. Restivo said that Windows Phone tends to thrive in parts of the world that are traditional strongholds for Nokia, Microsoft’s flagship handset partner. In many of those markets, there is less demand for the iPhone because of its high cost and the lack of carrier subsidies.
