Apple tops Samsung in smartphone sales globally in Q4; first time Apple is on top since 2011

For the first time since 2011, Apple led the global smartphone market in units sold during a quarter. The 74.8 million iPhones sold in the final three months of last year topped the 73 million handsets sold by Samsung, which finished in second for the fourth quarter. For the 2013 fourth quarter, Samsung was on top with 83.3 million smartphones sold. Apple was next as it rang up 50.2 million smartphones in that quarter. The latter's sales rose 49% in the last quarter of 2014, while Sammy's declined 12.4%. Strong sales were run up for the two new larger-screened iPhone models. The 4.7-inch Apple iPhone 6 and 5.5-inch Apple iPhone 6 Plus both proved that iPhone fans merely needed larger sized screens to break out of their funk.

The data, which comes from researcher Gartner, shows Apple with 20.4% of the world-wide smartphone market in the last three months of 2014 compared to 19.9% for Samsung. The data is similar to what Counterpoint Research reported back in January. IDC, on the other hand, showed Samsung remaining on top by a small margin in the October through December period. We should point out that Gartner's data is based on sales to end users while Counterpoint and IDC are looking at shipments.

Gartner has Lenovo-Motorola in third place for the fourth quarter of 2014 with a 6.6% share. Huawei was fourth and Xiaomi fifth. The latter had the biggest increase during the quarter as its sales tripled to 18.6 million units. For all of 2014, Xiaomi tripled its sales to 61.1 million phones. Also for the entire year, Samsung remained on top with 307.5 million smartphones sold. Apple sold 191.4 million iPhones for all of 2014. Lenovo, Huawei and LG rounded out the top five for last year. Including featurephones, Samsung led the way with 392.5 million handsets sold for all of 2014.

As we told you previously, despite Android accounting for 80.7% of all smartphone sales in 2014, Apple took home the crown where it counts the most. The latter accounted for 89% of all smartphone profits in 2014. Apple achieved those profits despite iOS accounting for only 15.4% of smartphone sales for the year.


source: Gartner via Forbes