As I predicted last month, Samsung is the world's #1 smartphone vendor, based on full-year figures. Apple failed to sell sufficient iPhone 4S units to prevent Samsung from wresting the top spot from a fast-fading Nokia.
Remember back in December, when I wrote this?
Samsung is probably the world's #1 smartphone vendor, based on year-to-date figures. Apple is unlikely to be selling sufficient iPhone 4S units to catch up.
..
The back of my envelope tells me that Samsung is very probably still the #1 smartphone vendor. .. Whatever the reality, when the various market research organizations publish their numbers in January, there's going to be avid interest in Cupertino and Seoul.
The numbers are in -- at least, the ones from Strategy Analytics -- and Samsung has indeed retained the top spot in smartphones for the complete calendar year of 2011. Well done, me ;-)
Here are the highlights, as I seem them:
- The smartphone market as a whole grew 63% to 488.5 million units.
- Apple's share almost doubled, growing by 96% to 93 million units.
- But Samsung's share quadrupled, growing 308% to 97.4 million units.
It's clear that Apple put in a strong last-minute showing, just pipping Samsung for the top spot in Q4. But this says more about Apple's 'delayed' introduction of the iPhone 4S, than anything about Samsung's business.
It's certainly not credible to think that Apple will be able to maintain its Q4 run-rate much into this year. People are already anticipating the introduction of the so-called iPhone 5, even though its release date isn't expected to be until mid-year at the earliest.
This will have the inevitable effect of repeating the pattern we've seen in previous iPhone product cycles -- a few months of depressed sales, followed by pent-up demand, causing a sales peak and temporary inventory problems at Apple stores.
But the next question is: Where next for Samsung? I assume the company can't maintain that dizzying 4x growth rate, but it seems likely we'll see Seoul pass the quarter-billion mark some time this year.
With that kind of market clout, the expected introduction of smartphones based on the Intel/Samsung Tizen platform should make for interesting times ahead!
Richi Jennings is an independent analyst, specializing in blogging, email, spam, security, and other technology topics. His writing has won American Society of Business Publication Editors and Jesse H. Neal awards. You can encircle him at +richi, follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be his friend at Facebook.com/richij or just use boring old email: io@richij.com.
