Global smartphone sales have shown a huge rise in Q3 2013 owing to consumers opting for affordable smartphones replacing their basic handsets, reported Gartner, one of the leading industry research firm on Thursday claiming that smartphones account for almost half of the total mobile phone sales.
Gartner revealed that worldwide smartphone sales increased 45.8 percent to 250.2 million units in the quarter ending September making up for more than half of total mobile phone sales. Total mobile phone sales increased by 5.7 percent to 455.6 million units.
“Sales of feature phones continued to decline and the decrease was more pronounced in markets where the average selling price for feature phones was much closer to the ASP of affordable smartphones,” said Gartner’s principal research analyst, Anshul Gupta, in a statement.
“In markets such as China and Latin America, demand for feature phones fell significantly as users rushed to replace their old models with smartphones,” he added.
Samsung, with the maximum 32.1 percent third quarter market share, remained world’s biggest smartphone vendor. Even with a 2 percent market share drop, Apple followed Samsung for the second spot with 12.1 percent market share as compared to last year’s 14.3 percent. Lenovo climbed to the third position with a 5.1 percent share compared to last year’s 4.1 percent.
Android, with a massive share of 81.9 percent as compared to last year’s 72.6 percent, remained the most used smartphone operating system. Apple’s iOS accounted for a 12.1 percent of the smartphone market down from last year’s 14.3 percent, while Microsoft’s’ share increased 3.6 percent from previous year’s 2.3 percent.
By the end of 2013, global mobile phone sales are expected to reach 1.81 billion units, up 3.4 percent from 2012, reported Gartner.
Gupta said “We will see several new tablets enter the market for the holiday season, and we expect consumers in mature markets will favor the purchase of smaller-sized tablets over the replacement of their older smartphones.”
