Celebrating the Countries Where Windows Phone Sells Best

In a recent smart phone market share report, Kantar Worldpanel basically just talks about iPhone. But its accompanying data visualization widget provides a lot more information about smartphone OS market share data across different countries. And with this tool, we can get a rough idea—assuming you trust their data—of the countries in which Windows Phone is in fact performing quite well.

Here’s the widget.

This tool is kind of fun to just play around with. But if you jump into some of the countries individually, you can see that Windows Phone isn’t just doing quite well. It’s actually growing as well.

With a reminder that Windows Phone’s global OS market share stood at just 2.8 percent, let’s start with Europe.

In France, Windows Phone has fully 13 percent market share, very close to iOS, with 20 percent (Android sits at 65 percent). This compares to 9.6 percent from a year ago, so things are going quite nicely in one of my favorite countries. And iOS actually fell during this same time period, so Windows Phone’s gains came at the expense of iPhone. Excellent.

In Italy, Windows Phone’s market share is a bit better at 13.2 percent vs. 18.3 percent for iOS and 67 percent for Android. Unfortunately, Windows Phone lost a bit of share: It controlled 17 percent of the Italian smart phone market a year ago. Boo.

How about Germany? Here, Windows Phone has 8.9 percent of the market, up from 6.8 percent a year ago. Boom.

Moving over to South America, we see that Windows Phone has 9.1 percent of the Argentina smart phone market, down slightly from 9.4 percent a year ago. And over in Australia, Windows Phone snagged 8.7 percent, up nicely from 5.1 percent one year ago.

Obviously, I’m highlighting some successes. Windows Phone does terribly in some markets—a woeful 0.2 percent in Japan, for example, and a surprisingly low 3.8 percent in Brazil, a market I understood was going well. But in the United States, Kantar claims Windows Phone market share is better than average, though falling a bit: It is 4.3 percent this year, down from 5 percent a year ago. (The US is somewhat unique in that iOS market share is close to that of Android, and Apple actually gained share in the US year over year. How are there any new iPhone customers left in this country?)

As you may know, my family does a home swap in Europe each summer—this year we’ll be in Lyon, France—and my wife and I have a longer-term goal of living overseas part time once the kids are out of the house. So on Twitter the other day, I joked that I would base my residence on which country had the best Windows Phone market share, and change it up each year. So if that was happening this year, I guess I’d be heading to Italy, though of course Kantar’s data doesn’t cover every single country. That would be molto bene with me.