Gartner Report Shows Samsung Topped Third Quarter Phone Sales

Samsung

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Figures for mobile device sales in the third quarter are in and it appears that Samsung has overtaken both Apple and Nokia in mobile device sales around the world for that period. This was revealed by a report released by Gartner recently.

According to the report, the South Korean company was able to sell around 98 million units for the third quarter of the year, which accounts for around 23 percent of the market for all mobile phones in the world. The figure also represents an increase of nearly 19 percent compared to the same period last year.

The report also showed that the lead of Samsung over Apple in total smartphone sales has widened as the company sold around 55 million smartphones for the quarter compared to the 23.6 million units that Apple sold in the same quarter. Around 32.5 percent of the entire smartphone market now belongs to the South Korean company compared to the 14  percent market share of Apple.

The SamsungGalaxy S3 was the top-selling device for the quarter.

In terms of mobile phone sales, Nokia sold around 82 million units although only 7.2 million of these were smartphones. But Gartner indicated that smartphone sales for Nokia may increase in the fourth quarter with the release of the latest Lumia devices that use the Windows Phone 8 OS.

In terms of smartphone sales, Research In Motion placed third despite issues plaguing some of its mobile devices while fourth place went to HTC. But the rankings may change soon enough since sales for both RIM and HTC have gone down recently even as both companies are facing challenges that may affect their rankings in the upcoming quarters.

The Android OS has remained on top of the smartphone OS rankings as around 72 percent of all devices sold for the quarter are using the mobile OS from Google. In second place is the iOS of Apple with around 14 percent while the BlackBerry OS came in third with around 5 percent. The Window Phone OS came in fourth with around 2 percent.

However changes are expected for the fourth quarter with the release of the iPhone 5 of Apple as well as the Windows Phone 8 of Microsoft. Total mobile phone sales for the third quarter reached 428 million, which is smaller by 3.1 percent compared to the same period last year. This includes around 169 million units of smartphones, which an increase of around 47 percent compared to the same period last year.