The Treo Family Challenge

There were a lot of projections (as opposed to predictions) made at the PalmSource conference two weeks ago which got me thinking about exactly how challenging it might be for palmOne, PalmSource and other PalmOS licensees to garner a significant share of the rapidly growing market for smart phones.

To evaluate this I needed to do a little online research and found yet more projections about the wireless market as a whole.  This proved to be quite an amusing process as I came across piles and piles of contradictory figures as every party seemed intent on creating their own version.

Here's a little of what I've managed to put together so far:

The current market size for all wireless phones is some 650 million units per year worldwide.  This is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35% to 2.9 billion units by 2009.

The current market size for smart phones (even though nobody agrees on what is or isn't a 'smart phone'...) is 17 million units worldwide.  This is projected to grow at 52% CAGR to 137 million units by 2009.

The smart phone market will therefore be growing at a somewhat faster pace than the overall wireless phone market to account for 3% of total unit sales today to 5% in 2009 (not exactly extraordinary...)

Under the current 'smart phone' terminology, the Treo family with 650,000 unit sales has a market share of some 4%.

Here came the real question: how fast would palmOne need to grow in order to become the smart phone market leader?  Well, with these projections the figure came at 255% CAGR... So palmOne will need to grow its unit sales by a factor of 2.5 year on year from their 650K today to 70 million by 2009 in order to break past that famous 50% market share line and give it absolute dominance of the smart phone space (but still only 2.5% of the global mobile phone market giving the company plenty of room to grow...).

You know what this means for all us Treonauts out there no?  We'd better start  e_v_a_n_g_e_l_i_z_i_n_g  everyone we know and their brothers and sisters too to help make this a reality... 

We'll call it the 2009 Treonauts Family Challenge...  On your marks, ready, steady, GO!