BOGOTA, Colombia—A national survey of Colombian wireless users finds Nokia Corp. dominating the Latin American country’s mobile handset market, which despite its modest size—at 43 million in population, the world’s 30th largest country—provides a glance at a rapidly growing emerging market and battleground for handset vendors.
Nokia claims 55 percent of the market, while its nearest competitor, Motorola Inc. has 11 percent. Siemens (now BenQ Mobile) had 9 percent, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. 6 percent and Sony Ericsson 5 percent. Rounding out the list of well-recognized vendors, Sagem has 3 percent of the market, Kyocera Wireless Corp. has 2 percent and LG Electronics Co. Ltd. has 1 percent. The remaining 7 percent of the Colombian market is divided among “other,” according to the just-released survey of 400 wireless users by the nonprofit telecom think tank CINTEL in December.
In Latin America as a whole, the final quarter of 2005 saw 30.4 million handsets sold, the largest sell-through volume for the region to date. More than 100 million handsets were sold in the region in 2005, an increase of 40 percent over the prior year.
