Smartphones Became More Popular than Basic Handsets

Smartphones have for the first time outsold more basic handsets worldwide. It was noticed that demand for the high-tech devices grew in the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The statistics show that handset manufacturers sold 435 million mobile phones in the 2nd quarter of 2013, with 225 million of them being smartphones.

While the telephone is replacing laptop and desktop computers in access to the worldwide web, it is no surprise that sales to end-users of smartphones grew 74% compared to the same period 2012 in Asia-Pacific, 56% in Latin America and 32% in Eastern Europe. Overall, smartphones accounted for almost 52% of mobile phone sales, thus surpassing feature phone sales for the first time ever.

As for the market leaders, Samsung reinforced its leading position – the company sold more than 71 million Internet-enabled phones in the 3 months to 30 June 2013. Last year it was only 56 million. Overall, Samsung’s market share by units sold increased from 30% to 32%, while Apple’s market share fell from 19% to 14%, though its sales increased from 29 million to 32 million.

Another popular smartphones manufacturer appeared to be Lenovo – the Chinese company well-known for making PCs. The tech giant made its determined push into mobile market by more than doubling its unit sales. In the meantime, Lenovo still relies heavily on its home market, as its sales in China represent 95% of the total.

Then, Sony’s popular Xperia smartphone range helped the company sell more than 2 million more phones – both smartphones and basic devices – than in 2012, expanding its market in mobiles to 2.2% from 1.7%. Although Huawei sold 1 million more devices, its all-mobiles market share remained at 2.6%.

The Finnish giant Nokia retained its position behind Samsung as the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world, but its market share is now 14%, behind Samsung’s quarter of the whole market. In the meantime, Microsoft has finally overtaken BlackBerry among the most popular smartphone OS, largely due to increased sales of Nokia’s Lumia range using the Windows Phone OS. So, Microsoft’s share increased to 3.3% from 2.6%, while BlackBerry’s high-profile relaunch, with the first devices running on its improved BB10 OS, largely failed to halt its decline. As a result, BlackBerry’s market share fell twice.