Global smartphone sales to end users increased 42 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, outpacing 5.6 percent growth in worldwide mobile handset sales over the same period, market researcher Gartner Inc said in a report yesterday.
Gartner’s latest report, which based its measurement on sales of mobile handsets to end users instead of shipments by handset makers, showed global smartphone sales totaled 115 million units in the third quarter, while worldwide handset sales reached 440.5 million units in the quarter.
“Our forecast for the end of the year remains broadly in line at a worldwide level as regions such as Asia/Pacific and the Middle East and Africa make up for weaker performance in the Western European market,” Gartner’s Munich-based analyst Annette Zimmermann said in a statement.
However, global smartphone sales in the third quarter grew only marginally to 26 percent of all mobile phone sales, compared with 25 percent in the previous quarter, Gartner said.
“Strong smartphone growth in China and Russia helped increase overall volumes in the quarter, but demand for smartphones stalled in advanced markets such as Western Europe and the US as many users waited for new flagship devices featuring new versions of the key operating systems,” said Roberta Cozza, a London-based analyst at Gartner. “Slowdowns also occurred in Latin America and the Middle East and Africa.”
The latest report also showed that South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co, maker of the Galaxy-series Android phones, led the global smartphone market in the July-to-September period by selling a total of 24 million units, outperforming Finnish handset maker Nokia Oyj’s 19.5 million units over the same period.
Gartner said Samsung was the No. 1 smartphone maker for the first time, ahead of Nokia in Western Europe and Asia, but was the second-largest vendor in overall mobile sales in the third quarter after Nokia.
However, the smartphone market is expected to see much more fierce competition in the fourth quarter as Apple Inc bounces back because of record pre-orders for its iPhone 4S, the market researcher said.
Apple sold 17.3 million iPhones in the third quarter, up 21 percent year-on-year, but down nearly 15 percent from the second quarter, Gartner said.
BlackBerry handset maker Research In Motion (RIM) sold 12.7 million units in the third quarter, up 1.54 percent from a year earlier, while HTC Corp (宏達電) sold 12.1 million units of smartphones in the quarter, up 86.43 percent year-on-year, the report said.
In overall mobile phone sales, Nokia led the market with a market share of 23.9 percent in the third quarter, followed by Samsung's 17.8 percent, LG Electronics Co's 4.8 percent, Apple's 3.9 percent, ZTE's (中興通訊) 3.2 percent and RIM's 2.9 percent.
HTC saw its global market share increase to 2.7 percent from 1.6 percent in the quarter, while Motorola saw its market share rise to 2.6 percent from 2.1 percent, the report said.
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