Thanks to the Samsung Galaxy S III, the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy Note II smartphones, Samsung Electronics is fresh off record-breaking numbers for Q3, Q4 and the entire year of 2012. So it should be no surprise that Samsung topped the UK smartphone marketplace in January of 2013. The UK market is one of the largest in the world, and the South Korean smartphone manufacturer dominated the top 3 best selling spots for the first month this year, while Apple slid and Nokia gained.
Incredibly, this is the 9th consecutive month that Samsung has held onto the top spot on the UK best-selling smartphones list, a position they currently hold with the Galaxy S III 4G Android smartphone. The smartphone sales information for the UK was provided by industry analyst uSwitch, and that company uses both sales and web search activity to uncover the most popular and best-selling smartphones. The Galaxy S III has been a globally popular handset, selling more than 40 million units worldwide.
In the number 2 and 3 spots for Samsung on the top 10 UK smartphone list was the Galaxy Ace and Galaxy S II respectively. In the two years that the Galaxy S II smartphone has been sold around the world, it has tabulated just over 40 million units sold. As one of the hottest smartphones on the planet currently, the Galaxy S III has notched almost as many sales in less than a year of availability. In a sign of market share flip-flop, two of the bottom spots on the top 10 UK smartphone list were inhabited by Apple. Coming in at number 7 was the 16GB version of its iPhone 5, and the 16GB iPhone 4S landed in tenth.
uSwitch Spokesman Ernest Doku pointed out that December’s 2012 mobile top 10 for the UK read, as he put it, “like a smartphone Santa wish-list.” He went on to state that the UK loyalty to the Samsung brand has been consistent over the last several months, but that smartphone manufacturers like Nokia and LG have been steadily climbing the rankings, sending perennial best-seller Apple to the lower end of the chart.
He also predicts that in the near future, with BlackBerry launching their Z10 debuting the new BlackBerry 10 operating system, and the Nokia Lumia 620 sneaking in on the affordable end of the smartphone marketplace in the UK, we can expect some significant movement in the coming weeks. With the Mobile World Congress kicking off on February 25 in Barcelona, Spain, impressive announcements could cause further change to the UK top 10 smartphone list as well.
