The smartphone market is an extremely competitive market. Many different manufacturers fighting to take their shares of the market and profits. In order for them to achieve this they need to come up with new products all the time to keep customer interest and keep competition in check. Apple is one such company. Apple’s mobile market share has always been somewhere in the top 3. Figures just released by Gatrner enforce that fact.
The above table shows figures from this quarter. Apple’s mobile market share currently stands at 5.5%. Compared to same time last year it’s a growth from 3.9%. Sales increased from 17 million to 23 million. Apple’s mobile market share is still a distant third to Nokia and Samsung which stand at 19.2% and 22.9% respectively. Samsung even managed to sell nearly a 100 million phones. Nokia managed 82 million. It’s however important to note that most of these high sales figures come from cheap feature phones in developing markets. Apple’s iPhone isn’t exactly cheap and neither is it part of many developing markets. Apple’s iOS accounted for 13.9 percent of the smartphone operating system market share
Worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users reached almost 428 million units in the third quarter of 2012. overall mobile phone sales were down 3.1%, smartphone sales were up 47% year over year.