Slotted Phone Shipments To Increase To 990 Million By 2013, Says Strategy Analytics

A recent report from Strategy Analytics (News - Alert) showed that the shipments of slotted phones will increase to 990 million handsets by 2013. The report titled, “Removable Memory Card Forecast: Slotted Phone Shipments to Reach 990 Million in 2013,” reported that shipments of slotted phones amount to nearly 70 percent of all phone shipments.

 

According to Stuart Robinson, author of the report and Director of the Handset Component Technologies service, this Strategy Analytics revised forecast on slotted phones is based on the view that within the next two or three years. If the cost of NAND Flash memory continues its rapid decline, then the cost of including high capacity embedded memory will be less than that of many components such as the display and the baseband processor.

 

Robinson also said that it is possible that the industry will see more high-end phones with significant embedded memory and no slot.

 

The report revealed that shipments of phones with a removable memory card slot totaled almost 685 million units in 2008. This figure represents almost 60 percent of all cellphones shipped in 2008. In addition, the trend for the higher capacity microSDHC format continued. The higher capacity microSDHC format grew from 3.5 percent of slotted phones in 2007 to 22 percent in 2008 and to an estimated 54 percent in 2009.

 

Commenting on the revised forecast, Steve Entwistle, Vice President of Strategic Technologies within Strategy Analytics, said that they believe the introduction of new formats has slowed since the domination of microSD. However, new developments will be essential in order to increase capacity beyond 32GB and also to improve read/write speeds above 100mbps.

 

Entwistle also said that new initiatives from the industry such as microSDXC could steer slotted phones in the right direction to be competitive with embedded memory in cellphones.

 

The five-year forecast report provides detailed shipment and installed base figures for slotted phones in six regions and 23 countries worldwide.