The latest Gartner report has been released, this time focusing on smartphone sales for the fourth quarter of 2012. Diving right in, the report notes the quarter as breaking records. In fact, Gartner is reporting that Q4 2012 smartphone sales were up 38.3 percent as compared to Q4 2011. Or in actual numbers for the quarter, Q4 2012 saw smartphone sales of 207.7 million. Anyway, given some of the other recent smartphone sales reports we have seen — we suspect you can guess which companies are on the top of the list.
The tops were Samsung and Apple, who when combined accounted for 52 percent of the market. That number has also increased from the previous quarter when it was sitting at 46.4 percent. Samsung did however take the number one position, not only for smartphone sales, but also for overall mobile phone sales. Coincidentally, feature phone sales were said to have remained week during the fourth quarter. They accounted for 264.4 million units, which was down 19.3 percent year-over-year.
Samsung numbers were shown to be 64.5 million for smartphone sales during the fourth quarter and 384.6 million for all mobile phone sales during 2012 as a whole. Looking at this year-over-year and we see an increase of 85.3 percent for smartphone sales going from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012. Apple sales were said to reach 43.5 million for the fourth quarter which was up 22.6 percent from the same quarter in the previous year. As a year in total Apple had 130 million smartphone sales.
Huawei managed to break into the top three (for the first time) and had 27.2 million in smartphone sales for the year. This is up 73.8 percent year-over-year. Stepping back from the companies and looking at Android for a moment. This report shows Samsung as having 42.5 percent of the Android market globally. The interesting part here, the next vendor in line has just a 6 percent share. The key here, while this sounds good for Samsung, Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner noted that the Galaxy brand is now “nearly a synonym for Android phones in consumers’ mind share.”
[via SlashGear]
