Samsung Market Share Growth Continues to Best Apple: comScore

For the three months ending in November, Apple grew its share of the U.S. smartphone market by 0.5%, according to latest report on the U.S. smartphone market from comScore. Samsung Electronics grew its shareby 1.7%.

Published January 7, 2014, 8:00am ET · 1 min read

Galaxy S4

courtesy of Samsung
For the three months ending in November, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) grew its share of the U.S. smartphone market by 0.5% compared with the three-month period ending in August, from 40.7% to 41.2%. At the same time, Samsung Electronics grew its share of the smartphone market by 1.7%, from 24.3% to 26.0%. Fully two-thirds of all smartphone sales in the United States are made by these two companies.

The data comes from the latest report on the U.S. smartphone market from comScore.

The not-so-good news for Samsung is that its fourth-quarter profit is expected be down by 6% year-over-year and 18% sequentially. The company paid a bonus of around $4,000 to each of its 240,000 employees, and that has sparked calls to return more cash to investors. Fourth-quarter revenue estimates have fallen from $57 billion to around $55 billion.

On the operating system front, the Android platform from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) extended its share in the period, growing by 0.3% from 51.6% to 51.9%. Apple’s iOS gained 0.5%, in the same proportion as its hardware growth. The Windows platform from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) lost 0.1%, dropping from 3.2% to 3.1%. Blackberry Ltd. (NASDAQ: BBRY) lost 0.5%, falling from 4.0% to 3.5%.

The mobile sites with the greatest reach belong to Google, followed by Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB). Facebook’s mobile app reaches more than 76% of all smartphone users, and its Instagram app has a reach of 26.2%. Of the top 10 smartphone apps measured by reach, Google holds five spots.

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Paul Ausick

Paul Ausick has been writing for 247Wallst.com for more than a decade. He has written extensively on investing in the energy, defense, and technology sectors. In a previous life, he wrote technical documentation and managed a marketing communications group in Silicon Valley.

He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Chicago and now lives in Montana, where he fishes for trout in the summer and stays inside during the winter.

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