Samsung is still the number one smartphone seller in 2014

Mar 4, 2015 14:20 GMT  ·  By

2014 was not a good year for Samsung and the latest sales numbers come to prove exactly this statement. Resting upon the failure of the Galaxy S5, the Korean tech giant has seen its sales plummet in several markets across the world during the period.

Now a recent report coming out of research firm Gartner shows that Apple overtook Samsung as the world’s biggest smartphone vendor in Q4 2014.

Apple takes the crown away from Samsung

According to the figures offered by Gartner, Apple managed to push 74.8 million iPhones in the holiday quarter, while Samsung only sold 73 million phones. The difference isn’t all that big, but given the fact that Samsung sells countless handset models and Apple only has a handful, we have to admit that the outcome is pretty impressive.

Naturally, the spike in iPhone sales is probably owed to the fact that Apple unleashed the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus back in October, conveniently just before the holiday shopping frenzy kicked off.

We expect that Samsung will manage to catch up with Apple in 2015, as the Korean tech giant has just rolled out the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge on the grounds at MWC 2015 in Barcelona.

The two models have received a positive initial feedback, so Samsung is confident its new flagship will manage to outsell even its most popular smartphone to date, the Galaxy S4.

Going back to the Q4 2014 global smartphone vendor top, further down the line we find Lenovo (which includes sales from Motorola) with 24.3 smartphones sold worldwide, Huawei with 21 million, and Xiaomi with 18.5 million.

Samsung still managed to sell the most smartphones throughout 2014

Gartner also lists annual numbers regarding smartphone sales. As it turns out, last year, more than one billion handsets were shipped to customers around the world.

Samsung did manage to come up in top position as the number 1 smartphone vendor in 2014, with 307,597 million units sold (24% market share in 2014, compared to 30.9% in 2013).

The runner-up is Apple with 191,426 million units delivered to users (15.4% market share in 2014, compared to 15.5% in 2013), while Lenovo completes the top three with 81,416 million units (6.5% market share in 2014, compared to 5.9% in 2013).

Rounding up the top five are Huawei and LG Electronics.