Symbian looks to 200 million mark

At the start of today's Symbian Expo in London, CEO David Levin proclaimed the operating system has the potential to increase its market share by over 1,300 per cent in the coming years.

Currently, the open OS - main rival to Microsoft in the smartphone market - features in around 15 million handsets and Levin said that he hopes to see that number grow to reach the 200 million mark.

Symbian has its work cut out for it – while Levin described the cumulative growth of five million handsets leaving shelves in the first half of this year from two million in the whole of 2002 as "a hell of an achievement", he said of the OS's progress: "We're just getting started."

Where will the magic figure of 200 million phones come from?

"The market we are targeting is the 200 million smart phones [that could run and benefit from an open OS]... over the next five years. The market is promising but it's early days," Levin said, adding that to achieve that figure the company would need to prove its worth though innovation.

One of Symbian's major shareholders, Sony Ericsson - who recently invested £57.4m in the open OS company - had its own suggestions as to where the growth would come from.

Sony Ericsson's president, Miles Flint, said: "I think Symbian does need to find a way to take more of ground that the proprietary OS now occupies."

Flint also said that he would like to see the company making more of its international presence.

"We would like to see Symbian with stronger position in the American market than perhaps it has today," he said.