As it has for several quarters now, Apple continues to trail the overall smartphone market's booming growth, with the company's 16.8 percent year-over-year growth in the first quarter registering as the lowest among top five vendors in a market that grew by 28.6 percent as a whole, according to a new report from research firm IDC. Market leader Samsung also trailed the broader market's growth as Huawei, Lenovo, and LG all jockeyed for position in the closely contested third through fifth spots in the rankings.
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Apple reached a new first quarter record, breaching the 40 million unit mark. The company saw double-digit growth in Japan as well as across multiple developing markets, including Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia. Still, this made for the lowest year-over-year improvement among the leading vendors. What remains to be seen is when – not if – Apple's rumored large-screen models will arrive on the market, filling a gap in the company's portfolio that has been exploited by the competition.
In the overall mobile phone market, Apple again outperformed most of the competition as feature phone sales continue to dwindle. With Apple's all-smartphone lineup taking nearly 10 percent of the overall market in the quarter, the company is within striking distance of Nokia, which garnered 11.3 percent of the market as it continues to be hit hard by the decline in feature phone sales and instability as it has shifted from Symbian to Windows Phone. Just days ago, Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia's phone unit, officially uniting software and hardware in what has been a close partnership over the last several years.
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Apple last week announced record March quarter earnings on the strength of its 43.7 million iPhones shipped. The iPhone continues to drive Apple's overall financial performance, representing 57 percent of the company's revenue for the quarter.
Top Rated Comments
The point here is?
(I'll tell you what the point is... the industry needs to stop treating this as one giant monolithic market. It doesn't work that way in other industries... why does it work that way in the phone business)?
Apple's profits in the phone business are rising. Samsung's profits in the phone business got CUT IN HALF over the past year.
Yet the problem is... Apple's market share?
Apple does their own thing. They shouldn't stop now. Keep moving forward and don't look back.
And Apple wins the profits from phones war also.
[edit] Samsung does make some ok phones. But a large number of them are not that good at all.
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This is the main point here. Apple clearly wins this war.
You don't need to spin the news macrumors just report the bigger headline
Apple is doomed
These reports have been able to suppress this story the last few years by continually moving more and more phones into the 'smartphone' category to make said category grow faster than Apple to make Apple look bad. This includes many Android devices with no data plans. However, within the next year they will run out of dumb phones to reclassify as smartphones and Apple's true growth will become impossible to hide. I'll make some popcorn...
I wonder if Tim Cook has been doing the same while sitting on the Nike board of directors? After all, Nike has been in the fitness business in some way shape or form since before Apple existed. And now all of a sudden Apple is coming out with fitness apps and hiring in that area amid strong rumors of a watch with fitness functionality. :eek: