Gloomy mobile predictions from Juniper and Gartner

When even analyst firms are warning of declines and recession, you know the economic climate is bad. Juniper Research and Gartner have released their latest stats, and they're pretty downbeat.

Okay, so Juniper is still predicting nearly $36 billion of mobile entertainment revenues in 2010, but it's now adding a caveat that "revenue growth will be markedly lower if the global recession fails to bottom out over the next twelve months".

Its new report suggests that the best case scenario is that average annual growth in mobile entertainment revenues over the next two years is nearly 19 per cent, but that the worst case is a mere 7 per cent.

To be honest, given the current financial climate, many mobile firms would happily take 7 per cent growth.

Still, Juniper warns that not only will consumers spend less on mobile entertainment, but mobile firms will find it tougher to raise funding to develop new services.

Meanwhile, Gartner estimates that mobile handset sales in Q4 were down 5 per cent year-on-year to 315 million units. What's more, the company doesn't expect "very moderate growth" to return until the second quarter of 2010.

Gartner says Nokia maintained its market-leading position with 119 million sales in Q4, although its market share fell year-on-year from 40.4 per cent to 37.7 per cent.

Samsung was second with 58 million units, followed by LG (28 million), Sony Ericsson (24 million), and Motorola (22 million), while Others (including Apple) totalled 65 million sales.

On the positive side, Gartner says smartphones accounted for around 20 per cent of all mobile sales in North America during Q4.