Last year saw a record 700 million units of smartphones shipping around the world. To put that mind-boggling number in some sense of perspective, let’s throw an even higher number at you. The United States Census Bureau estimates that last year ended with just over 7.0 billion people walking around on planet Earth. That means that in 2012 alone, a smartphone was sold for approximately every 10 human beings. Before you think that that sounds about right, remember that this number does not reflect smartphones purchased in previous years that are still in use.
This is an absolutely astounding amount of smartphones to sell in one year, and accordingly, it is the record number of units ever shipped in a single calendar year. How big of an increase is this number over 2011 smartphone sales? 2012 worldwide sales experienced a staggering 43% jump over sales in 2011. And of all those hundreds of millions of smartphones, every other one was either a Samsung or Apple device. These numbers were supplied recently by Strategy Analytics, an online and offline industry analyst.
Phones like the Samsung Galaxy S III helped South Korea-based smartphone manufacturer Samsung increase their share to 30.4%, up from 19.9% the previous year. Apple is next with 19.4% smartphone market share in 2012, growing from 19% in 2011. The flat-line negligible growth for Apple is said to be a reflection of the cookie-cutter design and lack of significant feature improvement from iPhone to iPhone, while Android smartphone manufacturers like Samsung typically offer substantially tweaked and upgraded handsets with each release.
And you only have to go back to 2010 to see when Nokia was the shipper of the most smartphones in the world. But the growth of the large high-resolution screens on the Samsung Galaxy S lineup, and the global popularity of the Apple iPhone, have sent Nokia into 3rd place as a global smartphone shipper. Nokia’s smartphone market share has freefallen down to only 5%, dropping from 15.8% in 2011.
Linda Sui is an analyst at the Boston based Strategy Analytics, and she stated that Samsung shipped 213 million global smartphone units in 2012, more than double their 97.4 million the previous year. Apple did increase number of units shipped by nearly 50%, with 135.8 million units delivered in 2012, over 93 million in 2011. As the above numbers indicate, despite the incredible popularity and success of lines like the best-selling Nokia Lumia series, Nokia smartphone shipments slipped by more than half to 35 million units last year, as opposed to 77.3 million units in 2011.
