“Apple Inc. captured the top spot in China’s smartphone market, vaulting it into a tie for global leadership for the first time since 2011 as booming sales of iPhones with larger screens helped it gain ground on Samsung Electronics Co.,” Bloomberg reports.
“Both companies shipped 74.5 million smartphones globally in the fourth quarter to grab 19.6 percent of the market each, Strategy Analytics Inc. said in an e-mailed statement Thursday,” Bloomberg reports. “Lenovo Group Ltd. was third with a market share of 6.5 percent after its acquisition of Motorola Mobility.”
“Apple’s move into larger screens hit Samsung in an area it pioneered as the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were popular in markets where consumers want a bigger device to perform the role of a phone and tablet computer. In China, the world’s largest market, Apple surged into first place, overtaking local vendor Xiaomi Corp., which fell three spots to sixth place globally,” Bloomberg reports. “Shipments of all mobile phones, including those with limited Internet access, rose 7 percent last year to a record 1.8 billion units. Samsung shipped 405 million units for a 22.4 percent share, followed by Microsoft Corp.-Nokia Oyj with 11 percent. Apple was third with 10.6 percent.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple doesn’t play the market share game. With their inimitable iPhone, they offer only premium, market-defining smartphones, not junk, all the way down the line, blurring the line between smartphones and feature phones like Samsung. This nonexistent market share race between Apple iPhone and “Android” (whatever that is) is nothing more than an analyst/media concoction.
In the race that matters, the race in which Apple does run, profit share, Apple utterly dominates. Second place is so distant, it’s like they’re not even on the same planet, much less on the same track.
And, by the way, estimates of Samsung’s unreported unit totals are based on:
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Scamdung only shipped that figure wheras Apple sold that many
Nice take MDN …..
If you exclude the dumb smart phones Apple has no compare and as MDN pointed out in profits second to none ….
End of Story!
Tied ? But Samsung’s numbers only they know. So Apple is the leader in smartphones sales . And not just by the numbers , but also quality , satisfaction , long time value , security and profits .
Not even trying?
Do or do not, there is no try.
Apple is doing, all over Samdung (hence the name)
On Tuesday, Apple announced that they sold 74.5 million iPhones and yesterday Samsung announced how many phones of all types that it shipped. They don’t break it down into smartphones/dumb phones, that was done by an analyst and the end figure just happened to be exactly equal to Apple’s number.
I would certainly take a huge pinch of salt with that particular figure. Although I don’t think that market share is an important metric, I do think that comparing verifiable numbers of sold devices with an estimated number derived from shipped figures is misleading.
Samsung may have managed to save their corporate ego by coming up with this particular ploy, but the downward trend for them is real and can’t be massaged away indefinitely.
One little gem from Apple’s announcement on Tuesday was that the number of iPhones in the channel is lower than desired, which means that every iPhone being made is getting sold immediately and there isn’t enough spare capacity to keep the channel at the preferred level.
If Samsung had sold (or even shipped) more I’m sure they’d have let it be known. The fact that they’ve gone quiet suggests they haven’t
They can try to massage their sales numbers any way they want but it’s still going to show up on their internal accounting books as a loss of revenue and profits. That can’t be hidden unless they’re doctoring the books.
It’s like when people try to devalue Apple over loss of iPad or iPod sales as to how Apple’s business is faltering but when the final count is in Apple is still in the business of making plenty of money. We finally get to see how Xiaomi’s huge threat to Apple’s iPhone business is absolutely no threat at all. No matter how much false fantasy is being written about Apple, the reality comes out in living color every quarter and that’s what really matters.
If Samsung is actually paying bloggers to write trash about Apple, it appears they’re just throwing away more money because it seems to have no impact at all on Apple’s overall business.
I’m willing to suppose that the hit pieces ARE having a negative effect — but think of this — without them, Apple sales would be EVEN GREATER. Thus, by not actively combating the disinformation, Apple leaves money on the table.. but apparently they have decided that remaining aloof better protects the value of their brand.
Shouldn’t that say “Sales, not shipments”?
That’s what I thought too. Drawing must be from Shamesucks point of view.
Can be stated either way. It’s stated here as relavent to the story re SAMSUNG ie the figures from them are shipments NOT sales as they are trying to claim and servile hacks/analysts parrot.
The big difference is that Apple earned its success; Samsung’s was stolen.
I’m willing to wager Wall Street will continue to back Google and Android due to their overwhelming major mobile market share numbers. Old habits take a long time to die off. There are probably a lot of big Wall Street investors hoping that Android will have some sort of epic resurgence and destroy Apple’s iPhone business. The reason why I say that is from the criticism of how Apple depends too much upon its iPhone business. (Which is like saying why does Microsoft depend so much upon its Windows OS business or why does Intel depend so much upon its chip business)
Google is still reporting millions of Android activations daily which Wall Street finds quite impressive. I wonder if those activation numbers are being slowed at all by Apple’s current iPhone sales.
Comparing Apple to Samsung
Is like comparing diamonds to lumps of coal
I hate for the fact all the stockholder money making potential that might have been will have been lost years from now when anal-dips finally fess up to “OMG we were completely & utterly wrong all those years about Apple – our bad.”