Global smartphone sales up nearly a quarter
Latest figures from Gfk set Latin America as the top performer, closely followed by 'emerging' APAC countries, with western Europe trailing in sixth place
Smartphone sales continue to increase across the globe, growing 23 per cent overall year on year.
The exception was the "developed APAC" region, which saw a five per cent drop in shipments, due to subsidy changes in Korea.
This is according to market watcher Gfk, which revealed global smartphone sales set a new milestone for the fourth quarter of 2014, hitting $115bn (£75bn), an increase of 20 per cent. The number of units sold globally for the quarter increased 19 per cent to 346 million.
For the year as a whole, a total of 1.2 billion smartphones were sold, compared with 998 million in 2013. The value of sales also crept up, hitting $381bn for the year, compared with $330bn the previous year.
Breaking down into regions, shipments in Latin America increased 59 per cent, with emerging APAC countries in second place with 55 per cent growth, and the Middle East and Africa up 35 per cent.
The US was languishing in fifth place with 28 per cent growth. Central and eastern Europe is pulling ahead of western Europe in terms of shipments, seeing 37 per cent growth for the year, compared with 11 per cent.
GfK claimed China will remain the biggest market in terms of unit and value sales for the foreseeable future, but growth slowed dramatically in H2 2014.
Kevin Walsh, director of trends and forecasting at GfK, said: "The increase in the value of units sold in China, despite the recent plateauing of unit sales, is due to consumers' rapid adoption of higher-priced smartphones with larger screen sizes.
"This is a trend seen in most markets and GfK global data shows that the 5in to 5.6in segment grew by more than 130 per cent year on year in the last quarter of 2014 and by nearly 150 per cent in the full year. In 2015, we forecast this segment to become the dominant screen size band, surpassing 4in to 4.5in for the first time."