Samsung tightens mobile market stranglehold

Smartphone sales rocketed 43 per cent in Q1, according to Gartner

Global mobile phone sales increased slightly in the first quarter of the year, with Asia-Pac the only region to show real sales growth, Gartner has claimed.

But Samsung is still dominating the vendor leaderboard according to the market watcher.

Sales across EMEA declined 3.6 per cent, with North American and Latin American sales sliding 9.5 and 3.8 per cent respectively. The Asia-Pac region saw 6.4 per cent growth for the quarter, compared to the previous year.

Unsurprisingly, smartphones are outselling traditional mobiles, with 210 million units shipped in Q1, an increase of 42.9 per cent on the same quarter the previous year.

Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner, said: "More than 226 million mobile phones were sold to end users in Asia-Pac in the first quarter of 2013, which helped the region increase its share of global mobile phones to 53.1 per cent year on year.

"In addition, China saw its mobile phone sales increase 7.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2013, and its sales represented 25.7 per cent of global mobile phone sales, up nearly two percentage points year on year.

Gupta added: "The Chinese and local manufacturers have been exemplary at addressing the demands of buyers by offering affordable devices with optimum features such as 2.5G (EDGE) instead of 3G in a smartphone. In the smartphone market, local and Chinese manufacturers are making faster inroads as they account for 29 per cent share in the first quarter of 2013, up from 13.2 per cent a year ago."

In terms of vendors, Samsung held on to the top spot, seeing 13 per cent growth, with Nokia in second place and nursing a 4.9 per cent drop in market share. Arch rival Apple was in third place seeing a steady uptake of the iPhone 5 across more markets. Also in the top five were ZTE and LG Electronics.

In terms of operating systems, Android held on to the top spot with nearly 50 per cent more Android smartphones in use than a year ago.

Anshul added: "There are two clear leaders in the OS market and Android's dominance in the OS market is unshakable. With new OSes coming to market such as Tizen, Firefox and Jolla, we expect some market share to be eroded but not enough to question Android's volume leadership."