Apple and Samsung capture 50% of global smartphone market

According to AIB Research, Samsung and Apple dominate the smartphone market and together make up for 50 percent of the global smartphone market. Although smartphone shipments grew 41 percent year-over-year to 144.6 million, as on the quarter ending March 2012, many smartphone OEMs are not enjoying the benefits of a rapidly expanding market. Samsung and Apple captured 55 percent of global smartphone shipments in Q1 2012 and over 90 percent of the market’s profits. Here’s a breakdown of the global vendor shipments for Q1, 2012. All values are in ‘Millions of units’.

• Apple - 35
• Huawei - 6.8
• Nokia - 11.9
• RIM - 11.1
• Samsung - 43
• Sony - 7
• ZTE - 4.9

On equal footing (Image source)

Samsung is now the leader, shipping 43 million units of its huge fleet of Android devices around the world. Apple comes in as a close second, which still a big deal, given that they only have a handful of phones and tablets to offer. Nokia comes in third at 11.9 million units followed very closely by RIM at 11.1 million. We then have Sony at 7 million, followed by Huawei at 6.8 million. You’ll notice that LG is nowhere in the running and is lagging way behind and the same goes for Motorola as well. Of the top ten smartphone OEMs, only Samsung and Sony experienced sequential growth in shipments over Q4, 2011. Nokia witnessed a 40 percent sequential decline in shipments and may soon be passed by ailing RIM in shipments, despite the BlackBerry maker’s 20 percent sequential decline in shipments. “At this point in the year, Nokia will have to grow its Windows Phone business 5000 percent in 2012 just to offset its declines in Symbian shipments,” says Michael Morgan, senior analyst, devices, applications & content.

Despite the shipment growth opportunities that China offers, smartphone OEMs will have to contend with local vendors ZTE and Huawei whose cost structures are tailored to deliver smartphones and homologated content ecosystems at the lower price points needed to drive growth across the country. Meanwhile, the Indian mobile handset market has witnessed a huge shift in dynamics with tier one vendors, such as Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola, and LG losing a significant amount of market share to the smaller local players like Micromax Mobile, G’Five International Limited, Spice Global, Karbonn, Maxx Mobile, Lava International Limited, and Zen Corporation. These vendors benefited from their feature-rich, localized product offerings at much lower price points.