Published in News

Global phone shipments hit 1.6 billion units

by on25 January 2013



Samsung, Apple and Nokia still on top


The PC market is slowing down, but phone makers are doing better than ever. According to Strategy Analytics, a total of 1.6 billion phones were shipped globally in 2012.

There is more good news for handset makers, as 700 million of them were smartphones, with significantly higher average selling prices than feature phones. However, smartphone growth is expected to slow, as the market matures and smartphone penetration heads toward 50 percent.

Samsung managed to sell 213 million smartphones in 2012, up from 97.4 million units in 2011. Samsung’s smartphone market share rose to 30.4 percent in 2012, up from 19.9 percent in 2011. Apple also saw its shipments jump from 93 million in 2011 to 135.8 million last year. However, Apple’s did not grow its market share as much as Samsung. Apple seized 19 percent of the market in 2011 and it only managed 19.4 percent in 2012.

Nokia ranked third, but much of Samsung’s growth came at its expense. The Finnish company saw its smartphone shipments drop from 77.3 million units in 2011 to just 35 million in 2012. Its market share slipped from 15.8 to 5 percent. Nokia’s overall phone shipments also fell from 417 million units in 2011 to 335 million units in 2012.

Samsung managed to ship a record 396.5 million phones and captured 25 percent of the market, with a clear lead in both the smartphone space and feature phone space. ZTE lost a bit of share, but it still ended up in fourth spot, with 71.7 million phones shipped in 2012.

Rate this item
(0 votes)