World Smartphone Sales Increase By 45%

The mobile market has continued to explode as predicted, with global sales of smartphones rising by a staggering 45% in Q3 of 2013, up to 251 million from 172.8 million compared with Q3 2012.

Smartphones now account for 60% of all mobile phone sales worldwide. This rampant increase in the number of smartphone sales is due to the ever increasing demand in the developed countries in North America and Western Europe as well as an upsurge in demand for 3G smartphones in developing countries like India, China and Brazil.

The race to the top in this ever expanding market is currently being fiercely contested by the global giants, Samsung and Apple. Samsung, which currently remains the leading brand now accounts for around 35% of all smartphone sales worldwide. Samsung’s sales grew by a whopping 55% in Q3 to nearly 90 million, compared to Apple’s 34 million, which is an increase of 26%. However, Apple has seen its market share drop by 13% globally, but this is expected to change with the release of the latest iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c.

The increase in the demand for smartphones is due to the cheaper lower end smartphones; this can also be attributed to the decline of Apple’s market share as it targets the higher end and more desirable end of the smartphone market.

Apple is also beginning to see a decline in their share of the operating system market, with their IOS software accounting for only 14%, compared with Android staggering 79%. Further to this, Blackberry which has been on the decline for a number of years, has now been over taken by Windows, who take a tiny 3% of the market.

The mobile market really is the fast growing market in history; with overall smartphone sales expected to hit 1.9 billion this year. This growth is so substantial that it has already eclipsed the dot com boom of the late 1990’s. Here in the UK, and increasingly globally, if you go into any mobile phone shop all you will see for sale are smartphones. However, in the UK, 95% of businesses do not have their mobile solutions in place to keep pace with their increasingly mobile customers; therefore the market really is wide open to get these businesses mobile.