Windows Phone is outselling the iPhone in seven nations, says Microsoft mouthpiece corporate vice president of corporate communications Frank X Shaw.

“Windows Phone has reached 10 percent market share in a number of countries, and according to IDC’s latest report, has shipped more than Blackberry in 26 markets and more than iPhone in seven,” Shaw blogged a couple of days back.

Shaw didn’t explain exactly what IDC data he referred to, but it is presumably the firm’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, the latest edition of which gave the combination of Windows Phone and Windows mobile two point six per cent of the market for the last quarter of 2012 and two point five per cent for the whole year.

Also in 2012, IDC says, either Windows Phone or Windows Mobile was present on 17.9m phones. For a little perspective, 23.9m Symbian phone shipped in the same time, as did 32.5m BlackBerries and 135.9m iPhones. Android ruled the roost with 497.1m shipped.

The New York Times reports the nations where Windows Phone is kicking Apple in the core are Argentina, India, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine and a conglomeration of countries called “Rest of Europe”.

It’s undoubtedly good news for Microsoft to be beating Apple in places as populous as India and Russia. Yet both are poor nations, when looked at through the lens of GDP per capita, so it’s unlikely Apple’s making colossal sales in either nation. Windows Phone may therefore be ahead of its fruity rival without clocking up huge sales.

The craft of corporate communications cares little for such analysis, if it doesn’t serve one’s agenda, so the rest of Shaw’s post also needs some scrutiny. The assertion that “last quarter, we tripled the number of Office 365 paid seats year over year”, for example, is worth a look because Microsoft has of late started to refer to hosted Exchange and SharePoint as part of Office 365, a name previously reserved for cloudy personal productivity apps.

Shaw also says “Azure has doubled its customer base with revenue growing 3X and Windows Server 2012 Datacenter edition licenses have grown more than 80 percent”, but offers no timeframe for that growth. ®