Samsung’s smartphone shipments soared over the same period last to easily grab the lion’s share of the global market, a market researcher said Thursday.
While another market researcher put Samsung No.1 in the overall cell phone market.
The South Korean electronics giant’s share went from 12.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011 to a whopping 30.6 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Strategy Analytics (see chart below).
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab family followed with a market share of 15.4 percent in February, followed by the Motorola Xoom with 7.0 percent share.
A second market research firm, IHS iSuppli, ranks Apple No.1 in smartphone market, while placing Samsung in the No.1 spot for cell phones (see charts below).
“Samsung’s global smartphone shipments rose 253 percent annually…as demand surged for its popular Galaxy models such as the Note, S2 and Y,” Strategy Analytics said.
According to market research firm Gartner, smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter of 2011 reached 149 million units, a 47.3 percent increase from the same period in 2010.
(Credit:Strategy Analytics)The loser in all of this is Nokia, whose share dropped like a rock from 23.5 percent in the first quarter of last year to 8.2 percent this year.
Looking exclusively at the top four carriers, AT&T accounted for the largest share of unique smartphones in Texas (46.2 percent), California (42.9 percent) and Illinois (42.1 percent), while Verizon claimed the top spot in New York (43.6 percent) and Florida (36.5 percent).
“This is Nokia’s lowest market share level in the smartphone category since 2002,” Tom Kang, director at Strategy Analytics, said in a statement.
It was the top seller of Android based smartphones in the US in 2010, with a market share of 11.8%, but lost the top spot to Samsung Electronics this .
“Nokia’s new Microsoft Lumia portfolio has recently gotten off to an encouraging start in the critical United States market, but shipments there are not yet large enough to offset the firm’s tumbling Symbian volumes in the rest of the world.”.
Apple and Samsung are each close to commanding 25% of the global market share of smartphone unit shipments, according to research firm IDC, which estimates the smartphone market will reach $219 billion in sales in 2012.
In the “smartphone segment of the cell phone market,” iSuppli shows Apple shipping 35 million units in the first quarter, while Samsung shipped 32 million.
Apple is suing Samsung over its smartphones that run Android, the operating system created by Google, Apples main target in the patent wars.
That said, iSuppli ranks Samsung No.1 overall in the cell phone market, with 92 million cell phones shipped in the first quarter, compared to Nokia’s 83 million.
Although a large phone coupled with a stylus has detractors—Steve Jobs once said in 2010, “If you see a stylus, they blew it”—Samsung’s Galaxy Note has shown there is a market for such a device, selling 5 million Galaxy Notes as of last month.
Bill Vanzyl is a business journalist based in Tokyo, Japan. Bill has a passion for financial markets and breaking news stories and loves writing about business news, stock market, and economic opinions that matters most to its audience. Bill spends a lot of time discovering and researching latest financial markets and industry news stories in order to make sure the latest and greatest stories are brought to you first on BigBoardNews.com.
