Surging smartphone sales kept the mobile phone market growing during the first quarter, but just barely. Worldwide mobile phone sales were up just .7% from the first quarter of last year, according to the latest research from Gartner.
Smartphones now account for just under half of all mobile phone sales worldwide, and will soon account for the bulk of phone sales if current trends continue. Gartner says 426 million mobile phones were sold during the first quarter, and that 210 million of those were smartphones. Smartphone sales were up 43% from the year-ago quarter.
Samsung is the leading vendor, selling an estimated 100 million mobile phones, 65 million of which were smartphones. Apple sold 38.3 million iPhones in Q1, earning the No. 2 smartphone vendor position, and the No. 3 mobile phone vendor spot behind Nokia. Nokia, until recently the world’s leading mobile phone vendor, sold 63.2 million phones in Q1, 5.6 million of which were Lumia smartphones.
LG Electronics, ZTE and Huawei are the other leading mobile phone vendors. Smartphones represent at least half of phone sales volume for each of these companies, making them the top smartphone vendors after Samsung and Apple.
One of every four mobile phones sold during Q1 was sold in China, and one of every two was sold in the Asia-Pacific region. Overall phone sales declined in Europe, North America and Latin America, but of course smartphone sales increased.
Within China, domestic manufacturers captured 29% of the market, up from 13% during the first quarter of 2012. “The Chinese and local manufacturers have been exemplary at addressing the demands of buyers by offering affordable devices with optimum features such as 2.5G (EDGE) instead of 3G in a smartphone,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner.
Android and Windows were the only mobile operating systems to see market share gains year-on-year. Android captured the lion’s share of new users; Gartner says its market share is now just under 75%. Windows’ gain was more modest – it now has 2.9% of the market, up from 1.9% a year ago. Gartner says iOS now has 18.2% of the market, down from 22.5% a year ago.
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