Samsung overtakes Apple as global smartphone leader

Fri 28 Oct 2011 11:09am GMT / 7:09am EDT / 4:09am PDT
MobileHardware

Smartphone shipments show four-fold year-on-year increase in Q3

Apple

Established in 1976, Apple is a multinational corporation (corporate headquarters based in California)...

apple.com

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Samsung has overtaken Apple as the number one smartphone manufacturer in the world.

According to research firm Strategy Analytics, reported by Bloomberg, the South Korean company shipped 27.8 million smartphones in the third quarter - almost four times its shipments in the same quarter last year.

Samsung's telecommunications division doubled its year-on-year sales to $2.2 billion, which is around 60 per cent of the company's total revenue.

By contrast, sales of the iPhone fell by 16 per cent to 17.1 million units in the third quarter, giving Samsung a 23. 8 per cent share of the smartphone market.

Samsung and Apple are currently engaged in a string of patent disputes in a number of global territories, principally over similarities between the iPad and Samsung's Galaxy tablet.

3 Comments

Devante Adams
designer

Whats with this old news malarky!!!
This was covered ages ago.
The debate over shipped vs sales proves shipped is a marketing tool and not an actual figure of sales.
I could ship 400 android tablets but that doesn't mean any consumers bought them (have you learned nothing from sony's book of marketing crap regarding shipped instead of sales numbers).

Posted:A year ago

#1

Michael Shamgar
Post-CEO

Nocturnal Entertainment Australia

@Devante: these companies don't care about "sold to customer" - they get paid per unit shipped to retailer. Its all that matters to them.

Posted:A year ago

#2

Andrew Goodchild

What does need to be taken into account is that Samsung sells Android smartphones in a large range of price brackets, you can get a galaxy for £80, making it viable for a PAYG or cheap contract. The section of the market buying a £80 Galaxy could not buy an iPhone in the same price range.
I think to have meaning you possibly need to compare the Samsung handsets that fall in the £300-£600 price range that Apple operate in.

That said, I haven't been that happy with my experience of having an iPhone. Apple evangelists inform me everything becomes obsolete eventually, but I didn't expect 3 months into a 2 year contract to have a non reversable OS update that crippled the phone, and a good few months before an update came to reduce (but not eliminate) the crashes and freezes that didn't happen on the old OS.
Everyone I know with Galexys seem to be very happy, including those on the £80 models, so I think in February I may go that way myself.

Posted:A year ago

#3

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