Apple Managed To Catch Up To Samsung In Q4 2014, They Are Now Tied As The World’s Biggest Smartphone OEMs

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Apple Managed To Catch Up To Samsung In Q4 2014, They Are Now Tied As The World’s Biggest Smartphone OEMs

Samsung and Apple are the biggest smartphone manufacturers in the world, and of course, fierce rivals. The Korea-based company hasn’t been doing all that well in 2014, at least not compared to previous years, company’s profit went significantly down and it seems that gave Apple the opportunity to catch up. According to a market research company, Strategy Analytics, both of these companies have 19.6% market share and are now tied for the first place in the world’s largest smartphone OEM category.

This Korean giant has sold 11.5 million handsets less in Q4 2014, than it did in the same period a year before. This comes down to 11% sales decline compared to the same period last year and a profit decline of 27%. Apple, on the other hand, managed to earn $18 billion in profit and marked an overall revenue of $74.6 billion, which are their best results ever. Fourth quarter 2014 was Apple’s best period of the year, the company sold 38.6% of their devices in Q4. Apple is doing really well in Korea (Samsung’s home market) and China, their sales increased in both of those markets, while Samsung’s sales went significantly down in China last year. This Asian country is the biggest smartphone market in the world, and it shows.

Lenovo is doing great as well, mainly thanks to their decision to purchase Motorola, considering they’re one company now. This China-based company is the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, and is followed by Huawei, a company who also marks significant profit lately. Huawei managed to ship out 24.1 devices in the fourth quarter of 2014, which is almost a third of their overall yearly sales. The smartphone market grew by 31% last year and 1.3 billion smartphones were shipped on a global basis during 2014.

If you want to get a complete picture, you can take a look at the images below this article which will show you Strategy Analytics’ graphs and the top 5 manufacturers on there. That being said, did you expect Apple to catch up with Samsung? I don’t believe many people expected Samsung’s decline, at least not a decline of these proportions. Anyhow, let us know what you think in the comments.