Nokia Could Sell 37 Million Windows Phones This Year

If 2011 was the year of Windows Phone’s slow slog to market, 2012 may be the year of its breakout.
With a decent selection of handsets in the marketplace — including Nokia’s newly announced LTE device, the Lumia 900 — Windows Phone is poised for some respectable market-share gains, particularly if Microsoft promotes it as aggressively as some expect it to.
Indeed, Morgan Stanley expects shipments of Nokia’s new Windows Phones to hit 37 million units in 2012, and 64 million units in 2013.
Add to this Morgan Stanley’s estimates for HTC’s Windows Phone handsets, and you get shipments of 43 million this year and 74 million the next. And that’s just those two OEMs alone. There are a few others for which the research house doesn’t provide estimates. Samsung, for example.
Pretty good, considering Microsoft’s smartphone efforts to date, and Windows Phone’s youth. One could argue that it’s unrealistic to expect blowout sales from these first Windows Phone smartphones, particularly given the market power of their competition — the iPhone and a growing array of Android handsets. Microsoft was never going to just stroll into the smartphone market with a slick OS and convert legions of consumers who have been ignoring it for years.
And the company knows it.
“We’ve got a lot of room to go in selling Windows Phones,” CEO Steve Ballmer said during his remarks at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this week. “But I feel very much like the work we’re doing is really going to pay off.”

source