Worldwide smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2015 rose 9.7% to 403 million units. While unit sales were high, growth was the slowest since the same quarter in 2008.
Samsung Electronics grabbed the market share lead in the fourth quarter with sales to end users totaling over 83 million units to nab 20.7% of the global market. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) ranked second with sales of more than 71 million units for a 17.7% share. In the fourth quarter of 2014, Samsung claimed 19.9% of the market with unit sales of more than 73 million and Apple posted unit sales of nearly 75 million units for a 20.4% share.
The lost market share is bad news for Apple, where iPhone sales accounted for 68% of revenues in the company’s first fiscal quarter ended in December.
It’s worth noting that Apple and Samsung combined account for 105% of the smartphone market’s profits. That means every other vendor is losing money, and Apple, which gets 91% of the profits, should be doing all it can to ensure that its share does not erode.
For the year, smartphone sales rose 14.4% to 1.4 billion units, according to research released Thursday by Gartner. Samsung’s sales rose to more than 320 million units in 2015, but the company’s market share slipped from 24.7% in 2014 to 22.5%. Apple sold nearly 226 million units last year and its market share rose from 15.4% to 15.9%. China-based vendor Huawei added 1.8 points of market share to nab 7.3% of the global market in 2015 with unit sales of more than 104 million.
Gartner research director Anshul Gupta said:
Low-cost smartphones in emerging markets, and strong demand for premium smartphones, continued to be the driving factors. An aggressive pricing from local and Chinese brands in the midrange and entry-level segments of emerging markets led to consumers upgrading more quickly to affordable smartphones.
By operating system, Android from Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) held an 80.7% share of the market for the fourth quarter, up from 76% a year ago. Apple’s iOS share slipped from 20.4% in 2014 to 17.7% in 2015. Market share for Windows Phone from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) slipped from 2.8% in 2014 to 1.1% and BlackBerry Ltd. (NASDAQ: BBRY) share dropped from 0.5% to 0.2%.
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