Gartner this week published a new report indicating that worldwide sales of smartphones to end users had a record fourth quarter of 2014 (with an increase of 29.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2013).
All told, last quarter smartphone shipments clocked in at 367.5 million units.
Arguably, the bigger story is that “Samsung lost the No. 1 spot to Apple in the global smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2014,” Gartner’s report summary reads.
Samsung had retained the top spot since 2011.
In 2014, sales of smartphones to end users totaled 1.2 billion units, up 28.4 percent from 2013 and represented two-thirds of global mobile phone sales.
“Samsung’s performance in the smartphone market deteriorated further in the fourth quarter of 2014, when it lost nearly 10 percentage points in market share,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Samsung continues to struggle to control its falling smartphone share, which was at its highest in the third quarter of 2013. This downward trend shows that Samsung’s share of profitable premium smartphone users has come under significant pressure.”
