Nokia’s fortunes in the overall mobile phone market continues to shrink. While many observers are expecting Nokia to finally end up a very distant shadow of its former self, its successor as king of the smartphone mobile phone market hill are furiously wrestling for the top spot. Apple and Samsung are caught in a persistent tug-of-war on which of them will be the top global smartphone producer. Nokia’s smartphone numbers have crashed year over year this past quarter, Samsung has come out on top. Not that Samsung has floated to the top of the ranks because of a robust market, mind you. Indeed, smartphone sales overall have been lagging and this softness has made the Korean conglomerate brand the top vendor of mobile phones the world over.
Globally, the mobile phone market dipped slighly during the first quarter. Unit shipments went down by a slight 1.5 percent. Nokia, which had consistently held the top spot for mobile phone sales since 2004 continue to lose market share. Its overall shipments slid by 23.8 percent year over year. This resulted in the Finnish phone maker taking the second place rank after Samsung in global market share. Despite its recent sales troubles, Nokia still retains a decent 20.8 global market share.
Too bad for Nokia, the competition for its remaining market share continues to heat up. Samsung posted a 35.4 percent increase to grab the top spot for all mobile phone makers. It holds a 23.5 percent marketshare. While Apple retained its third place spot at 9 percent of the total global mobile market. Apple zoomed up to number three thanks to the launch of the iPhone 4S. It managed to hold on to the number 3 spot. Also rans include the Chinese communications hardware giant ZTE which has a 4.8 percent share of the global mobile phone market pie. Korean electronics maker LG scored the fifth place spot for a 3.4 percent share. There is still a nice 39 percent chunk of the mobile phone market split up a wide number of mobile phone makers.
Smartphones are where the growth in the market is and that segment’s shipments has shot up 43 percent year over year.