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Central Europe marketshare situation – short analysis (part 2 / Czech Republic)

The second part of this summary focuses on Czech Republic. (part 1 – Poland, part 3 – Hungary, part 4 – Lithuania, part 5 – Ukraine)

 


Czech Republic flag

Czech Republic

 

Population: 10.3 mln
Internet users: 5.1 mln (50%)

Czech Republic is almost 5 times smaller than Poland, but has much better Internet penetration with 50% of its citizens connected to the Web.

Czech Republic has, similar to Poland, great and very strong Mozilla community (CZilla) founded in 2002. Group of project members with huge experience guarantees high quality and on-time releases with similar set of end-user oriented support features like we can see in Poland.

As I mentioned in part 0 of this article, Gemius has lower penetration here than for Poland. So while it still seems to be very representative, more data sources would be very useful.

 centraleurope-graph13

Let’s start the graph show with current market situation.

IE has a strong position with 67.2% which is 7.7% more than in Poland and even more than in the Polish emigrants group. Firefox has 27.5% – 5.8% less thanin Poland.

Firefox with over 1/4th and IE with 2/3rd are shaping the whole market.

 

 

To answer the question about how fast the Czech market is adopting new technologies, we can take a look at the versions graph:

centraleurope-graph14Similar to Poland, Firefox 2 has more users here than IE and both are behind IE6. But in contrast to Poland, in Czech Rep. IE7 is just few steps behind.

What we can see from this chart, is also a confirmation of the succesful upgrade policy of Mozilla.Over 90% of the Firefox users are using the latest stable release line.

The good news is that in all three cases we analyzed so far (Poland, Polish emigrants, Czech Republic) IE6 is below 50% point.

And in all three cases Firefox has at least 25% of the market share – which gets Mozilla near to its goal of having enough market share, to be sure that Firefox is here for a longer term.

Also, together –  Firefox and Opera have enough market share (over 30%) to ensure that no serious market player can ignore web standards.

I believe that if the web browsers that follow open standards will have over 30% of the market share, we’re safe from the threat of someone trying to close the web again. For Poland Gecko+Opera+KHTML is 41.1% right now. For Czech Rep. it is 32.1%.

 

centraleurope-graph15To get a better idea on what has happened during the last 4 months, let’s take a look at the aggregated change over time graph.

The 0 point is a situation as it was on 10th of September and the trend lines present how it has changed since then.

Situation is as clear as it can be. Perfect symmetry.

Firefox rocketed up almost 3% and IE lost exactly 3% with Opera expanding its user base by 0.5%.

 

 

To understand how the migration trends involve users upgrading their browser, let’s get a more detailed trend with versions of the browsers:

centraleurope-graph16

As one could have predict, IE7 is finally being installed on users machines.

Until November, the situation was very bad. With such a low upgrade ratio, it was pretty possible that we’ll have to live with IE6 for the next few years, but during last month the trend strengths and right now Czech Republic’s market share is under heavy modernization.

Notice, what such numbers tells us about the situation on the Czech market. We have 10 mln people country, migrating twice as fast as Polish market from IE6 to IE7. It means that the web sites are IE7 and Firefox ready (IE7 has gained 9,7% during last 4 months – at the same time IE6 has lost 12.7% and Firefox 2 has gained 3.6%).

 

Last graph – week to week time trend, will show us which direction the trend is taking – strengthening or slowing down. As you could see on the third graph in this post, Firefox is taking market share from IE in Czech Republic during measured time frame.

centraleurope-graph18But is it going to stay like this?

It seems so. Of course regression trends presented here are overestimating the more recent results, but overall the trend line is clear. Firefox is not only taking market share from IE, but it’s also doing it faster – two times faster – than it happens in Poland and faster than 4 months ago.

 

Bottom line: In Czech Republic, users are migrating from IE6 to IE7 and Firefox 2 very fast. In recent 4 months, IE6 has lost almost 13% of the market share, and should drop below 25% during next half a year. In the same time, Firefox is taking users from IE, and is taking more users now than 4 months ago, closing the year 2007 with 27.5% of the market share and visible speedup trend which means that the ground is well prepared for Firefox 3 (to be released in Q1 2008).

Stay tuned, next part is about Hungary.