Apple topped 2011 smartphone table says Gartner
In terms of end user sales, iPhone pipped Samsung to post, while the Korean firm closed on Nokia in overall handset space
Published: 15 February, 2012
READ MORE: Metrics | Handset | iPhone
The smartphone market figures for the last quarter of 2011 are coming through, and they all point to an epic struggle for the top spot between Samsung and Apple. Every estimate shows Apple winning the Q4 battle on the back of huge iPhone 4S uptake, and while some analysts calculate that Samsung was the winner for the full year, Gartner's new report puts Apple in top place for 2011 as a whole.
The Gartner survey says that worldwide smartphone sales to end users soared to 149m units in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 47.3% year-on-year, while total smartphone sales for the whole year reached 472m units, accounting for 31% of all mobile device sales. In cellphones as a whole, Apple overtook LG to become the third largest vendor after Samsung and Nokia, while it seized 23.8% of the smartphone segment in Q411, and 19% in the full year.
Western Europe and north America led most of the smartphone growth for Apple during the fourth quarter of 2011," said principal analyst Roberta Cozza. "In western Europe the spike in iPhone sales in the fourth quarter saved the overall smartphone market after two consecutive quarters of slow sales."
LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and RIM were all disappointing and were squeezed by the success of the big two, and also by a far stronger threat from the midrange and low end, led by ZTE and Huawei.
Worldwide mobile device sales to end users totaled 476.5m units in the fourth quarter, up 5.4% year-on-year, while in 2011 as a whole, sales were up 11.1% to 1.8bn units. "Expectations for 2012 are for the overall market to grow by about 7%, while smartphone growth is expected to slow to around 39%," said principal analyst Annette Zimmermann.
In the fourth quarter, Nokia's sales numbered 111.7m units, an 8.7% decrease from last year. "Samsung closed the gap with Nokia in overall market share," said Cozza. "Samsung profited from strong smartphone sales of 34m units in the fourth quarter of 2011. The troubled economic environment in Europe and Nokia's weakened brand status posed challenges that were hard to overcome in just one quarter. However, Nokia proved its ability to execute and deliver on time with its new Lumia 710 and 800 handsets. Nokia will have to continue to offer aggressive prices to encourage communications service providers to add its products to portfolios currently dominated by Android-based devices."
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