Android nears 75 percent share of smartphone sales
The latest numbers from Gartner show that the Android platform increased its market share by nearly 20 percent from a year ago, from 56.9 percent to 74.4 percent. That comes at the expense of iOS, Apple's smartphone operating system, which fell to 18.2 percent from 22.5 percent last year. RIM, the maker of Blackberry, also saw its market share cut in half to 3 percent. Microsoft, however, did see their share rise from 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent.
Samsung also grew its lead as the top smartphone brand worldwide, increasing its market share from 21.1 percent last year to 23.6 percent. Apple also increased its share from 7.8 percent to 9 percent, while Nokia took a hit, from 19.7 percent to 14.8 percent.
Overall, mobile phones saw a global uptick in sales in the first quarter with 426 million units sold, a 0.7 percent increase. Smartphone sales accounted for nearly half of that total, up from 34.8 percent last year. Though most mobile phone growth is concentrated in Asia.
“More than 226 million mobile phones were sold to end users in Asia/Pacific in the first quarter of 2013, which helped the region increase its share of global mobile phones to 53.1 percent year-on-year,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a statement. “In addition, China saw its mobile phone sales increase 7.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013, and its sales represented 25.7 percent of global mobile phone sales, up nearly 2 percentage points year-on-year."
Photo: Flickr/Chris Yarzab
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com