Samsung leads global smartphone market with strong sales in third quarter

Samsung has once again managed to post a strong smartphones sales record, and is followed by Apple in second position. Among other Chinese manufacturers, Huawei records the highest growth with better sales in both its native as well as global market, especially in Europe.

With Samsung refreshing its flagships back-to-back to address the slowing demands and compete with Apple, which is its major rival, the company has managed to sell 83,586.7 units in the third quarter of 2015, having a market share of 23.7%. In the same quarter in 2014 the company sold some 72,929.4 units, taking 23.9% of the market share, according to well known market research firm, Gartner.

Meanwhile, Apple also continues to dominate the high-end segment of the market, and sold a total of 46,062 units in the third quarter, with 13.1% share in the market. Huawei sees a significant growth in the market with 7.7% share, as opposed to 5.2% in Q3 2014. But both Lenovo and Xiaomi failed to keep the momentum going in terms of sales year-over-year, while losing some share in the market to rivals.

A total of 352,844 smartphones have been sold globally in the third quarter. The increasing sales, according to Gartner, are due to the launch of budget phones in emerging markets. However, the growth in mature markets is slower than in emerging ones.

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

As for the operating system, Android continues to lead the market, with a total number of 298,797 Android phones sold in the third quarter. Apple's iOS grabbed the second place with 13.1% of the market, against 84.7% occupied by Android. Microsoft's Windows and BlackBerry have 1.7% and 0.3% share respectively in the global market.