US : Strategy Analytics is predicting that shipments of mobile phones equipped with removable memory card slots will grow at an average 13% per year over the next five years, hitting 1.04 billion phones in 2011. A new report reveals that 592 million "slotted" phones were shipped worldwide in 2007, representing 53% of all cellphone shipments.

The report also concludes that, with nearly 57% of slotted phone shipments in 2007, the microSD (including microSDHC) slot format is now more popular than the MMC format. The microSD format is expected to hit peak penetration of 86% in 2011, after which it will face competition from other, new, high capacity systems, such as the Universal Flash Storage (UFS).

Steve Entwistle, Vice President of the Strategic Technologies within Strategy Analytics, explains, “Penetration of slotted phones is already over 85% in many developed countries. We are now seeing significant growth in emerging markets where demand for music and camera phones is taking off.”

Stuart Robinson, Director of the Handset Component Technologies service, adds, “Demand for high capacity cards to store music, images, video and data will trigger significant growth in the high capacity microSDHC format during 2008 and 2009. Strategy Analytics expects strong growth in embedded memory, too, over the next few years, but the benefits of being able to upsize your capacity and transfer your data to a new phone make memory card slots an essential requirement for all mid-to-high end phones.”