World Smartphone Sales increase by 28.6%

The mobile market is continuing to explode as predicted, with global sales of smartphones increasing by 28.6% in the first quarter of this year. A staggering 281.5 million smart phones were sold, an increase of 62.1 million in comparison to the same time in 2013.

In the world wide mobile phone market, which is inclusive of smartphones, 448.6 million mobile phones were sold. This is a modest 3.9% increase on the same time last year, however it is also a decrease of 9% from the final quarter of 2013. This is 0.6% lower than the 451.3 million mobile phones that been forecast to be sold in the first quarter of 2014.

With the increase in the number of smartphones which have been sold in comparison to mobile feature phones, smartphones account for 62.7% of all mobile phones sold in the first quarter of 2014, up by 12% to 50.7% in comparison to the same time last year.

The race to be the top smartphone provider in the world has remained relatively unchanged, with Samsung, Apple and Huawei keeping the first, second and third spots respectively.

Samsung remains the world leader in the smart phone market, and in the first quarter of 2014 shipped more smartphones than the next four smartphone providers, with 85 million smartphones sold, an increase of 22% in comparison to the first quarter of 2013.

Apple for the first time, has sold more than 40 million smartphones in a single quarter, an increase of 16.8% in the same quarter of 2013. This growth has been helped with its increase in sales in developing markets such as, Brazil, Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia. Despite this growth, it has still made the lowest year on year increase of any of the smartphone providers.

Apple’s decline has also continues in the operating system market, with iOS now only accounting for 15.5% compared with Android’s staggering 81% share. Further to this, Blackberry’s decline has also continued and its operating system now only accounts for 1.1% of the overall 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.