You’d be hard pressed to find someone covering the mobile industry who was not starstruck by Google’s second quarter earnings call yesterday. The search giant broke news by announcing it was activating an unprecedented 550,000 devices per day and Android sales now total 135 million. On the app front, the Market now hosts over 250,000 apps, shortening the lead held by the Apple App Store. The success of Android has helped Google’s second quarter revenues jump 32 percent year-over-year. At this point can anything stop Google from winning?
Android shipments in volume, an encyclopedia of manufacturers lining up and a stronghold on the search engine business has catapulted Google’s earnings above and beyond Wall Street’s expectations. Leading into yesterday’s call, the street was keen on quarter revenues of at most $8.6 billion. Google beat the mark by recording earnings of around $9 billion. Helping reach such incredible earnings was the addition of 2,452 full-time employees, bringing the total full-time workforce up to 28,768.
So just how fast is Android growing? On May 10th Google announced that 100 million Android devices had been sold (worldwide) which means approximately 35 million units were sold over the past two months. At this pace, Android is on track to top 200 million devices sold in 2011 — nearly half the total number of Nokia handsets sold per year. The days Nokia can sleep easy knowing it commands the leading in mobile market share and worldwide handset shipments is numbered.
By the end of 2011 daily Android device activations may top one million units per day. It would, however, require the current the five percent weekly growth to continue,which is unlikely, but still possible. In fact, if Google maintains a five percent weekly growth in activations it would hit the one million per day mark by October 13th, according to Unwired View. At this point in the game, Android has proven that it is here for the long haul. Demand continues to grow and there’s no sign of a slowdown. Like Charlie Sheen at the Playboy mansion, Google just can’t stop winning.
