One year on from a name change and the launch of its BlackBerry 10 smartphone platform, BlackBerry has now all but disappeared from the high-end mobile market.
Market research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) this week released its estimates for the U.S. mobile market during the fourth quarter 2013. The numbers show, unsurprisingly, that iOS and Android handsets dominate the market, with Windows phones trailing far behind. BlackBerry, however, is shown as having 0% of the smartphone activations during the holiday quarter. Though this might mean the company had no activations at all during the last three months of the year, it’s more likely that the total number of activations is small enough to be dwarfed into irrelevance by the total U.S. smartphone market.
The stat shows just how far BlackBerry has fallen in the past year. Former CEO Thorsten Heins (pictured) was ousted after a proposed buyout of BlackBerry failed, and interim CEO John Chen has now promised to re-focus the company of its enterprise and mobile security solutions. BlackBerry is currently
CIRP’s other numbers showed that 48% of smartphone activations in the fourth quarter were Apple iPhones. This tops Android mobile phone activations, which captured 46% of the U.S. market. Microsoft brings up the rear with 3% of mobile phone activations running a Windows Phone platform.
“Apple clearly benefitted from launch of the iPhone 5S and 5C just a couple weeks before the quarter started,” said Josh Lowitz, partner and co-founder of CIRP. “It increased its share considerably over the previous quarter, when it had only 34% of activations.”
Image via BlackBerry