David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The
bigger the better when it comes to smartphones. Huge fourth-quarter
sales for Apple's large-screen iPhone 6 line helped the company
over-take rival Samsung in the market for the first time since 2011, as reported by TechCrunch, from research done by Gartner.
Apple sold 74.8 million iPhones in the final quarter of 2014, bringing
its global share of smartphones up to 20.4 percent compared to 17.8
percent during the same period in 2013. With Apple surging, Samsung
dropped to 19.9 percent from 29.5 percent, selling 73 million units in
Q4 compared to 83 million in 2013.
Gartner reports that Apple's smartphone sales were up 49
percent in the fourth quarter, while Samsung fell 12 percent over the
same period. "Samsung continues to struggle to control its falling
smartphone share, which was at its highest in the third quarter of
2013," Anshul Gupta, research analyst at Gartner, said
in a press release. "This downward trend shows that Samsung's share of
profitable premium smartphone users has come under significant
pressure."
Overall there were 367.5 million smartphones sold
worldwide during Q4. The top five was rounded out by Lenovo, with 24.3
million units and a 6.6 percent market share; Huawei, 21 million phones
and 5.7 percent share; and Xiaomi's 18.5 million and 5.1 percent share.
"Chinese vendors (such as Huawei and Xiaomi) are no longer followers," Roberta Cozza,
research director at Gartner, said. "They are producing higher quality
devices with appealing new hardware features that can rival the more
established players in the mobile phone market."
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