More than 250 million Smartphones shipped in Q3 2013, market posts a record 38.8% growth – IDC


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We have been taking a look at the Smartphone market through the regular analyses from the folks at IDC, and the report for the 3rd quarter of 2013 is now out. The key takeaways from this quarter is that the overall smartphone market has grown at a record breaking pace, with 38.8% growth. The total Smartphone shipments are now at 258.4 million, higher than the earlier record last quarter, which was 237 million. The overall mobile phone market is now at a healthy 467.9 million shipments, with over 55% of the shipments being Smartphones. We saw smartphones surpass the feature phones this year, and the gap has widened even further. This is all attributed to the explosive growth in China, which contributes to more than 1/3rd of the total smartphone shipments.

“Price points have declined significantly, driven largely by low-cost Android solutions. This has helped China to become one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world, accounting for more than one third of all shipments last quarter. We expect this trend to continue going forward.”

Companies like Huawei and Lenovo are based in China and have seen huge double digit growths of 76.5% and 77.6% respectively to gain them a place in the top 5 Smartphone vendors. They are closely followed by LG with 12 million shipments and two other Chinese companies – Coolpad and ZTE who contributed slightly lesser. There are so many competitors to the Top 5 that the total market out of Top 5 has grown to a massive 41.3%, all thanks to Android.

But in addition to having close shipment volumes, they all have one key ingredient in common: Android. This has been a huge factor in their success, but it also speaks to the challenges of differentiation on the world’s most popular platform.

However the top two are still the same, with Samsung at 31.4% of the market, growing at 40.5% just above the market growth rate, and Apple at 13.1% of the market growing at a slower 25.7%.

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Samsung continues to dominate the overall mobile shipments too, but it’s obvious now that 55% of the market is all smartphones. Nokia seems to be still selling tons of feature phones, with just 8.8 million of the total 64.6 million being smartphones. That’s just 13% of their total shipments. Apple, LG and Huawei take up the other slots with them shipping just smartphones or very less feature phones. It increasingly looks like Nokia is the only company selling features phones these days with others opting for just a cheap smartphone at the low end. But, if the new Asha SW platform is considered a smartphone, then the total shipments count as 14.8 million, trumping Huawei to third place, but that’s not the case yet. The classification still differs.

China is easily the highlight of this report and that’s exactly where all the innovation is happening. It wouldn’t be surprising to see companies like Xiaomi or Oppo show up in this table in the future.

Source IDC


Author: Bharadwaj Chandramouli

Bharadwaj is a content creator who has been obsessed with technology since the early days of smartphones. He loves talking about tech, is a fan of good design and photography. You can follow him on Twitter @gadgetbuff_ to know what he's upto!