Jay Yarow vs. NPD Regarding U.S. Smartphone Market Share for Q1 2012

Jay Yarow does some math and finds that NPD’s report on U.S. smartphone market share doesn’t add up:

Total it all up, and Apple had 63% of the smartphone market on those three big carriers. Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T account for ~80% of the overall wireless market in the U.S., according to a Yankee Group report from August.

If Apple accounted for 63% of 80% of the smartphone sales on those carriers, then it had 50% of the total smartphone market in the U.S. in the first quarter of the year.

NPD got its numbers — 61 percent Android, 29 percent iPhone — not from carrier data but from a survey of 13,000 people. It just doesn’t make sense. Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint all say the iPhone accounted for a majority of their smartphone activations for the quarter, but NPD says Android had more than double the market share for the quarter.

NPD’s survey results must be statistically flawed, unless (a) the Yankee Group report is wrong that the big three carriers account for 80 percent of the U.S. market, and (b) there are an awful lot of prepaid Android smartphones being sold on the smaller U.S. carriers.

★ Thursday, 3 May 2012