AAPL: Ecosystem Matters, Says Raymond James; Pondering BB, Lumia Trends

After the long weekend, some on the Street are laying out their latest sense of the smartphone landscape.

Raymond James’s Tavis McCourt today writes that his review of research firm Gartner‘s “pivot tables” for Q4 mobile sales, published last week, show the ongoing shift from traditional mobile phones to smartphones:

It remains perfectly clear that the handset market globally is mature, but the mix shift to smartphones continues with 44% of handsets sold globally being smartphones, and smartphones enjoying 39% y/y growth. Based on expected seasonality, smartphone growth will likely slow to the 25-30% range in 2013 with the handset market likely maintaining its flattish shipments [�] Smartphone growth in emerging markets was 59% y/y, substantially higher than the global 39% growth, and particularly impressive in China, where the smartphone market grew over 100% and represented over 50% of handset volume. Mature smartphone regions are growing 17-21% y/y, and this is likely to slow going forward as penetration continues to increase.

McCourt thinks Apple (AAPL) continues to have advantages versus phones based on Google‘s (GOOG) Android where the attendant services and content matter:

Although the unit stats are staggeringly in Android�s favor, we believe app monetization and app developer resources continue to dramatically favor Apple. Essentially, there are parts of the world where a smartphone is simply a touch screen with an effective web browser, and in those parts of the world, Android is dominating. In the parts of the world where a smartphone ecosystem matters, it is a much more even match between Android and iOS.

McCourt thinks BlackBerry (BBRY) and Nokia (NOK) struggle, but there are different factors to consider:

Blackberry sales are in double-digit decline in emerging markets, which up until a few quarters ago were still in rapid growth due to the success of BBM. Whether this decline is due to permanent share gains by low-end Android devices or to customers holding off purchases until BB10 devices arrive could determine Blackberry�s turnaround success. Nokia gained back some share in Western Europe with its Lumia product line, but North American and APAC trends remain disconcerting.

Reflecting on the same Gartner data, William Power with R.W. Baird observes:

Interestingly, Gartner indicated that full-year total mobile device sales have not been down YOY since 2009. Within mobile devices, smartphones grew 38.3% YOY in Q4, while feature phones declined 19.3%, as consumers shift away from traditional feature phones and into entry-level smartphones. Additionally, Gartner noted that Huawei gained the No. 3 spot in global smartphone share after Samsung and Apple. Huawei shipped 27.2 million smartphones in 2012, up 73.8% from 2011. In contrast, Samsung shipped 205.8 million smartphones in 2012 and Apple shipped 130.1 million.

Power’s weekly survey of smartphone sales in the U.S. market, which he conducts by making calls to the carriers’ retail stores, show Apple’s iPhone 5 and Samsung Electronics‘s (005930KS) Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II are still the top sellers at Verizon Communications (VZ) and Sprint-Nextel (S), while the iPhone 5 leads those other two somewhat at AT&T (T). The Samsung devices are the top sellers at T-Mobile USA, though Google’s “Nexus 4,” built with LG, is “still garnering the occasional mention from reps.”

Also this morning, Mike Walkley with Canaccord Genuity takes a much tougher tone with BlackBerry, reiterating a Sell rating and a $9 price target, while cutting his estimates for this quarter and the fiscal year starting next month, based on what he perceives as mixed sales of the recently released Z10 handset:

Our global surveys post the recent BlackBerry Z10 launch indicated mixed initial sales with limited initial supply cited as the reason for early post-launch stock-outs at some carrier stores rather than overwhelming demand. Our follow-up checks have indicated steady but modest sales levels. With new BB10 smartphones launching in the U.S. only in mid-March or later at subsidized prices no better than competing high-end Apple/Samsung smartphones, combined with our expectations for the Galaxy S IV to launch at a similar time frame in the US market, we are lowering our BB10 sales estimates.

Walkley cut his estimate for this quarter to 300,000 BlackBerry sales from a prior 1.4 million. He did not provide his estimate for 2014 sales, but I have a request in to his office for that detail.

Update: Walkley’s total BlackBerry sales estimate for fiscal 2014, including both BB10-based units and BB7-based units, goes to 31.8 million units from a prior 32.4 million, as he cut his BB10-based unit sales assumption from 14.5 million units to to 13.9 million.