Worldwide sales of mobile phones continue to climb with smartphones accounting for over half of the 455.6 million handsets sold in Q3 2013 according to market research firm Gartner. Taking a 55% share of sales, smartphones hit their highest share to date as sales grew to 250.2 million units, up 45.8 percent over the same quarter a year ago. Much of the increase for smartphones came in the Asia/Pacific region but both Western Europe, which returned to growth for the first time this year, and the Americas also grew.
“Sales of feature phones continued to decline and the decrease was more pronounced in markets where the average selling price (ASP) for feature phones was much closer to the ASP affordable smartphones,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “In markets such as China and Latin America, demand for feature phones fell significantly as users rushed to replace their old models with smartphones.”
In the smartphone space, Samsung and Apple kept their respective positions as the two largest smartphone makers. Samsung’s overall smartphone market share remained at 32.1 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago while Apple’s fell slightly from 14.3 to 12.1 despite sales increasing 23.2 percent over the same period. Lenovo pushed LG out of third down to fourth with Huawei completing the top five.
In the smartphone operating system space, Android accounted for 81.9 percent of the market while iOS remained in second with a 12.1 percent share. Microsoft is solidly in third place now with a 3.6 percent market share while BlackBerry tumbled to a 1.8 percent share. Symbian held on to fifth spot with a 0.2 percent share.
Considering the entire mobile phone market, Samsung takes top spot with Nokia, Apple, LG and ZTE completing the top five. Lenovo held down the sixth position with Sony in eighth.
Gartner expects that mobile phone sales will hit 1.81 billion units in 2013.
Source : Gartner