The smartphone market picked up in the third quarter and grew by 15.5 percent year-on-year to 353 million units, according to estimates by Garter. The market researcher said the growing availability of affordable smartphones in emerging markets drove more feature phone users to upgrade to smartphones. Smartphone sales in emerging markets rose 18.4 percent on an annual basis to 259.7 million in the third quarter, compared to 8.2 percent growth in mature markets.
Samsung remained market leader in the quarter with a 23.7 percent share of unit sales, while Apple continued to grow its share, reaching 13.1 percent versus 12.5 percent of sales in the same period of 2014. Huawei was in third place with a 7.7 percent share, up from 5.2 a year ago thanks to its continued expansion at home and abroad. Lenovo, including Motorola, fell to 4.9 percent from 7.0 a year earlier, and Xiaomi also had 4.9 percent of the global market.
Among smartphone operating systems, Apple’s iOS continued to see a strong performance and grew 21 percent, above the market average. Apple had 13.1 percent share of Q3 sales, up from 12.5 percent a year ago. Android gained 1.4 percentage points in share year over year to reach 84.7 percent, thanks to strong smartphone sales from Samsung and Huawei globally. Windows' smartphone market share dropped from 3 percent to 1.7 percent year over year.
The overall mobile phone market, including both smartphones and feature phones, grew by 3.7 percent year-on-year in the third quarter to nearly 478 million units, Gartner said. Again emerging markets were largely responsible for the growth, particularly India, which helped Micromax join the top ten handset makers in the world with a 2.5 percent share. Samsung still had over a fifth of the total market, and Apple almost 10 percent, while Microsoft was in third place with a 6.3 percent share.
Source: http://www.telecompaper.com/news/smartphone-market-improves-to-155-annual-growth-in-q3--1114287