Apple Beat Samsung in Smartphone Sales in Q4

Gartner released today its report on the 2014 smartphone sales. While Samsung has still sold the most smartphones in 2014, it lost the lead to Apple in the crucial 4th quarter of 2014.

We saw an analyst report in January that said that Apple has sold the same number of smartphones as Samsung in the fourth quarter of 2014. Today, Gartner released its smartphone sales report, noting that Apple sold more phones than Samsung. The difference is 1.8 million. According to Gartner, Apple has a marketshare of 20.4% and Samsung has 19.9% in Q4. Lenovo comes in 3rd with the combined sales numbers of Motorola and Lenovo.

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor in 4Q14 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (March 2015)

*The results for Lenovo include sales of mobile phones by Lenovo and Motorola. 

In overall smartphone sales in 2014, Samsung has beaten Apple by about 120 million units. Samsung’s 2014 market share is 24.7% and Apple has 15.4%. 

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor in 2014 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (March 2015)

*The results for Lenovo include sales of mobile phones by Lenovo and Motorola. 

2014 was a great year for smartphone sales. 1.2 billion units have been sold to consumers, up 28.4% from 2013 and represented two-thirds of global mobile phone sales. 

“Samsung’s performance in the smartphone market deteriorated further in the fourth quarter of 2014, when it lost nearly 10 percentage points in market share,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Samsung continues to struggle to control its falling smartphone share, which was at its highest in the third quarter of 2013. This downward trend shows that Samsung’s share of profitable premium smartphone users has come under significant pressure.” 

“With Apple dominating the premium phone market and the Chinese vendors increasingly offering quality hardware at lower prices, it is through a solid ecosystem of apps, content and services unique to Samsung devices that Samsung can secure more loyalty and longer-term differentiation at the high end of the market,” said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner. 

Android is still the dominating mobile operating system with a staggering 80% market share. Apple’s iOS stands at 15.4% according to Gartner. Windows is #3 with 2.8%. 

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled nearly 1.9 billion units in 2014, a 3.9% increase from the same period in 2013.

2015 is wide open again as Samsung introduced with the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge very interesting smartphones that have a great design and features that the iPhone does not have. Samsung will have as every year about 6 month time to sell as many Galaxy S6 as possible before Apple comes out with the 2015 iPhone in fall.

Via Gartner.