Samsung holds steady, Huawei gains on Apple in latest smartphone sales figures

Despite the pressures faced by Samsung, the Korean electronics giant continues to dominate the global smartphone space as Huawei makes up ground on Apple. That’s according to the latest stats from technology research house Gartner, which also suggest that the global smartphone market is in no danger of slowing down any time soon.

According to Gartner, global sales of smartphones to end users totaled 353-million units, a 15.5% growth over the same period in 2014.

It’s that growing market which allowed Samsung to retain top spot in the global smartphone stakes despite losing market share. Apple’s rival-in-chief now accounts for 23.7% of the smartphone market, down from 23.9% in the same quarter a year ago.

The biggest gainer among the top five mobile players is Huawei, which now accounts for 7.7% of global marketshare, a big increase from the 5.5% it held at the same time last year. The only manufacturer to lose ground meanwhile was Lenovo. Previously in third place, Lenovo was overtaken by Huawei and now accounts for 4.9% of global smartphone sales.

Apple continued its dominance in the premium segment of the smartphone market with its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models for most of the third quarter of 2015. The global launch of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus during the last week of September 2015, along with the simultaneous launch in China, further added to its overall sales during the quarter.

“The availability of affordable smartphones in emerging markets saw consumers upgrade their ‘feature phones’ to smartphones more quickly because of the small price gap,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. “Smartphone sales in emerging markets rose to 259.7 million in the third quarter of 2015 — an 18.4% growth over the third quarter of 2014 — while sales in mature markets saw growth of just 8.2% over the same period.”

That much is evident when you consider that Huawei’s smartphone sales were enough to put in fourth place overall in the mobile marketplace as well as the fact that iPhones now account for nearly 10% of all mobile phone sales.

In the smartphone operating system (OS) market, Apple’s iOS continued to see strong performance and grew 21 per cent, above market average. Android gained 1.4 percentage points in share year over year thanks to strong smartphone sales from Samsung and Huawei globally. Windows smartphone market share dropped from three percent to 1.7% year over year.

If Gartner’s right, the release of Windows 10 isn’t likely to change that either.

“Despite the announcement of Windows 10, we expect Windows smartphone market share will continue to be a small portion of the overall smartphone OS market as consumers remain attracted by competing ecosystems,” said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner. “Microsoft smartphones will mainly focus on driving value for enterprise users.”