Apple Is Third Largest Mobile Phone Manufacturer
Market research firm IDC, which tracks the mobile phone industry, announced overall smartphone sales results for 2011.
The trends in the mobile phone industry indicate that feature phones, which are usually sold as messaging only phones, are on the decline in sales as smartphones are falling into the hands of more and more consumers.
The increase in smartphone sales is most likely an indication as to why Apple leapt ahead of LG putting itself into the position of the third largest mobile phone manufacturer. But Apple still is not the biggest.
Nokia is the largest player in the mobile phone marketplace, but their customer base is declining due to their volume of feature phone sales. Year over year Nokia still holds 26.6 percent of the market but they are down 8.2 percent from the previous year.
Second place Samsung, who managed 22.8 percent of market share, is looking to gain market share due to their increased sales of smartphones. Samsung manufactures several popular devices including the Galaxy S II, the Galaxy Note, the Galaxy Nexus, the Galaxy Ace and the Galaxy Y. They are also pushing into the Windows phone market with the Focus Flash and the Focus S. This wide variety of popular devices pushed Samsung to within 20 million units of the market leader Nokia. Year over year Samsung experienced 20.9 percent growth.
Third place Apple and their stable of iPhones pushed up to 8.7 percent market share over fourth-place LG. Apple experienced 128.4 percent growth from the previous year while LG, who sells a lot of feature phones was down 42.2 percent from the previous year.
Fifth place, according to the IDC report, was ZTE with 4.0 percent market share and all the others still had 33.8 percent of market share.
According to eweek, the worldwide mobile-phone market grew 11.1 percent, which was down from 2010’s 18.7 percent. But as smartphones continue to grow in popularity, IDC still sees growth in the mobile market.
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