Apple has overtaken Samsung Electronics in smartphone sales for the first time in two years — but don’t count on it staying ahead for long.
Apple has overtaken Samsung Electronics in smartphone sales for the first time in two years—but don’t count on it staying ahead for long.
Samsung sold 76.8 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, giving it a market share of 17.8 percent, but it was just beaten by Apple, which sold 77 million iPhones for a 17.9 percent share, according to figures from Gartner.
The fourth quarter is usually a strong one for Apple, boosted by holiday sales of the new generation of iPhones it releases each September, said Anshul Gupta, a research director at Gartner.
For Samsung, though, 2016 ended particularly badly, dominated by the fiasco around the recall of its incendiary Galaxy Note7 .
Super-phones like the Note7 could have accounted for 10 to 15 percent of Samsung’s smartphone sales in the period before its recall, said Gupta, but Samsung lost more than that: There was also the damage to its brand.
It could bounce back sooner rather than later, though, as it has a new flagship phone coming out at the end of March.
Apple, meanwhile, is expected to wait until September before unveiling new iPhones. This year will mark the iPhone’s 10th anniversary, and the next model is widely expected to be something special , so Apple fans may delay replacing phones until then, said Gupta.
