Latest Figures Show Who is Winning The Smartphone Battle

Gartner’s latest quarterly smartphone figures are out, so we can find out who is winning in the battle and who is losing out in this highly competitive market.

It will come as no surprise that Samsung is still top dog. In the last three months it sold 107 million mobile phones, 71 million of them smartphones, worldwide. Even though the industry as a whole has grown, Samsung has managed to keep pace and hold on to its share of the market. For comparison, a year ago, Samsung sold 45 million smartphones and 90 million mobile phones in total.

Whilst Samsung race ahead, Apple is beginning to lag behind a little. With the iPhone 5 not being as popular as anticipated, Apple takes second place selling 32 million smartphones. Whilst its competitors have seen smartphone sales almost double, Apple’s sales have only increased by about 3 million in the last year. Maybe with the upcoming release of the new phone, things will start to pick up again for the company.

For Nokia, the figures are not looking so good. The company sales are continuing to fall as not enough people are buying the Lumia Windows phone. The company failed to get in to the top five most popular smartphone makers and the total phone sales have dropped to 61 million, leaving them a 14 percent share of the market.

The dark horse of the race has been Lenovo, which has seen smartphone sales reaching almost 11 million units. For the first time the company has reached fourth place, with sales up by 144 percent compared to a year ago. However there is still work for Lenovo to do, as 4.7 percent of such a big market that is phones, will not get them very far.

Operating Systems

Windows Phone has overtaken BlackBerry for the first time. It has posted growth from 4 million units to 7.4 million this quarter. BlackBerry meanwhile fell from 8 million sales to just over 6 million this quarter.

Google’s Android operating system has once again grown, from 99 million units to 178 million units. It probably does not class as news due to the fact that if someone doesn’t have an Apple phone, then their smartphone will likely be  running Google’s OS.

Other facts that immerge from these figures, are that smartphone sales have finally exceeded standard mobile phones for the first time. The analysts at Gartner also point out that the cheaper smartphones are the ones that are seeing the biggest increase in sales, which could be why Apple are making a cheaper model of the iPhone.

[Images via gearpatrol & digital trends]

SOURCE: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/smartphone-sales-for-q2-2013/