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Apple’s Market Share Is Dwindling: Samsung’s Smartphone Sales Increase In The U.S.

By Thomas Kuegler
Published on: 04:41 PST, Feb 10, 2016

Apple is still leading the U.S. smartphone market due to steady sales of the iPhone 6s, but rival Samsung is catching up. While Apple market share in the smartphone realm sits at 40 percent, Samsung holds 31 percent of the market, with LG coming in third at 10 percent.

9 To 5 Mac reports that other competitors, such as Motorola and HTC, hold between 4 and 5 percent of the market, which is respectable but nothing compared to Apple’s market share.

“Apple remains the dominant smartphone manufacturer in the U.S., but Samsung is catching up,” said Harry Wang, the director of Health & Mobile Product Research at Parks Associates.

An interesting fact is that the Android platform makes up 60 percent of the smartphone market, whereas Apple products, like the iPhone 6s running the iOS, make up 40 percent.

There’s also a little information about the ever-changing trends with phone upgrades, according to the smartphone market report.

“Operators are pulling out all the tricks to encourage phone upgrades,” Harry Wang said. “The once-familiar two-year contract, which tied consumers to a two-year phone upgrade cycle, is gradually fading. U.S. carriers started to do away with two-year contracts in 2012, and by the third quarter of 2015, only 51% of mobile consumers had a contract, down from almost 70% at the end 2011.”

This is just in the U.S., but what about the world? How does Apple’s market share look in other countries? Macrumors reports that Samsung still leads Apple in the global smartphone market, shipping 81.3 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of the 2015 year.

Apple iPhone sales weren’t too shabby either, selling 74.8 million in the same period.

Macrumors reports, “Global smartphone shipments grew 12 percent annually from 1.28 billion in 2014 to a record 1.44 billion in 2015, according to the data. Samsung and Apple contributed 317.2 million and 192.7 million smartphone sales respectively to that worldwide total, while Huawei, Lenovo-Motorola, and Xiaomi rounded off the top five smartphone makers. All other vendors collectively shipped 637.5 million smartphones in 2015.”

As far as iPhone sales go, Apple still trails Samsung by a little over $100 million. Samsung’s global market share for the fourth quarter stood at 20.1 percent, while Apple’s market share was 18.5 percent.

Samsung improved in the fourth quarter of 2015 when compared to the fourth quarter of 2014, and Apple did the opposite — they declined.

A year ago, Apple matched Samsung in smartphones shipped because of the popularity of their iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The truth is that Samsung ships tons of different smartphone models, accounting for their domination at the worldwide smartphone market level.

When paired with the news of Tim Cook believing that iPhone sales will decline in March, the outlook doesn’t look so great for Apple’s market share.

Samsung’s likely to continue pummeling Apple on the global stage and also continue to catch up to Apple in the United States.

As mentioned before, Tim Cook noted that 60 percent of customers who owned an iPhone prior to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are not upgrading their phones, which is negatively impacting Apple’s market share in the present.

[Photo by David Becker/Getty Images]

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