Stocks: (YHOO)(NOK)(GOOG)
Yahoo! cut a deal with Nokia, the world’s largest handset company, to put its e-mail and instant messaging functions onto some Nokia models. For a company that now controls about a quarter of the PC search market compared to about 50% for Google, the cell phone has become Yahoo! next battleground. And, it would appear to be winning.
Nokia shipped over 80 million handsets last quarter. The latest Comscore data shows Yahoo! with a big lead on mobile devices for its instant messaging, e-mail, games, and driving directions. Google does not even show up in most categories. Yahoo! mail has five times the unique users on mobile devices that Google’s GMail. And, Yahoo! has close to parity on search with Google at 13% and Yahoo! over 11%.
Yahoo! will almost certainly not catch Google in PC-based search, but, there is always the phone.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.