Regained the spot that it took from Nokia in June and gave up to Samsung in September
Click to enlarge. Source: IDC
It will come as no surprise to Apple (AAPL) watchers that the company sold 37 million iPhones last quarter. Tim Cook reported that number two weeks ago.
Getting comparable figures from Apple's competitors is a different matter, and that's where companies like IDC come in. Samsung, for example, used to report only the number of mobile phones it shipped -- which is not the same as selling them -- and in 2011 it stopped sharing even that.
So the report IDC publishes every quarter ranking the top smartphone manufacturers by its estimates of their worldwide shipments is a closely watched benchmark. Among the highlights of the press release it issued Monday: (I quote)
Apple climbed back into the market leadership position with the launch of its iPhone 4S worldwide, and in the process it reached a new shipment volume record for itself and for the entire industry for a single quarter.
Samsung marked a series of milestones for the quarter: breaking the 30 million units mark for the first time, posting the largest year-over-year increase among the top vendors, and finishing 2011 as the overall smartphone market leader.
Nokia posted the largest year-over-year decrease among the top vendors, but its smartphone strategy took another step forward with the release of its first Windows Phone smartphones.
Research In Motion finished the quarter with a mixed bag of results. Its new BB OS 7-powered BlackBerry smartphones reached additional markets, and total volumes for the quarter staved off a fourth consecutive quarter of sequential decline.
HTC: Despite the many high-profile launches during the quarter... the Taiwanese vendor still shipped lower volumes compared to the previous quarter.
Below the fold: IDC's Q4 2011 spreadsheet.
IDC gives Apple an even bigger edge, with Mac's U.S. shipments outpacing PCs 80 to 1
Source: Gartner
Tim Cook may not have seen the latest numbers. Or perhaps he's just more modest than Steve Jobs was. But he understated matters somewhat when he told the press last week that the Mac outgrew the PC market almost six times in the year ending in June and that it had outpaced its MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Oct 13, 2011 7:25 AM ET
Meanwhile, sales growth slowed worldwide as buyers shifted to smartphones and tablets
Source: Gartner
The iPad was the elephant in the room as Gartner and IDC reported that worldwide PC sales in the second quarter of 2011 were even worse than their modest expectations.
Shipments grew only 2.6% according to IDC and only 2.3% according to Gartner, well below the 6.7% Gartner had predicted and a fraction of the 12% IDC reported MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jul 14, 2011 7:14 AM ET
A report from IDC sets off some pretty silly headlines in the tech press
Source: Techmeme
The top item on the closely-watched Techmeme news aggregator Saturday morning was a piece by ZDNet's Larry Dignan about how the shipments of tablet computers have failed to meet the industry's "lofty expectations."
It was a theme picked up by at least eight other news outlets, including VentureBeat ("Tablet sales slow"), The Loop ("'media tablet' market MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jul 9, 2011 5:51 AM ET
Despite higher prices, sales to end users worldwide more than doubled
Data: Gartner. Charts: Apple 2.0
Gartner issued its "mobile devices" report for the first quarter of 2011, two weeks after rival IDC's.
Here's what Gartner had to say about Apple (AAPL):
Apple sold 16.9 million units to end users worldwide, more than doubling its sales of iPhones year-on-year. This market-beating growth came from all regions: the iPhone is now available in 90 MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 19, 2011 11:21 AM ET
The iPhone could be headed for No. 1 this year as it overtakes RIM and gains on Nokia
Click to enlarge. Source: IDC
The lead that Nokia (NOK) and Research in Motion (RIMM) have enjoyed for years in the smartphone market is evaporating rapidly, according to a report issued Thursday by IDC.
Their immediate problem is Apple (AAPL), which shipped 18.7 million iPhones in Q1 2011, more than double last year's shipments, MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 6, 2011 7:39 AM ET
The global PC market shrank 3.2% year over year in Q1 2011 as iPad sales surged
iPad demand exceeding supply in NYC. Photo: Computerworld
It's a pity IDC doesn't include tablets in its quarterly surveys of computer shipments. If it did, the inflection point in the first quarter of 2011 would be even clearer.
[UPDATE: Asymco's Horace Dediu has done us the favor of drawing an extraordinary graph that includes the iPad. MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Apr 13, 2011 8:03 PM ET
In a February ChangeWave survey, 70% were "very satisfied" and 25% "somewhat satisfied"
Click to enlarge. Source: ChangeWave
There were few surprises in the survey of 3,091 ChangeWave members polled just before the iPad 2 announcement.
Interest in buying a tablet among ChangeWave's early adopter types was up, to 27% from 25% in November.
Interest in buying an iPad was high -- with 82% preferring Apple's (AAPL) tablet to Motorola's (MOT) Xoom MORE
International Data Corp is showing that in the final quarter of 2010, smartphones passed global PC shipments for the first time in history.
As predicted a few months ago, Smartphones have passed PCs in global numbers. Today's IDC numbers have Smartphones climbing to over 100 million units for the quarter with Nokia (NOK), RIM (RIMM) and Apple(AAPL) bringing in the majority of those unit shipments. However, as you can see from MORE
Seth Weintraub - Feb 7, 2011 3:01 PM ET
(Not this kind of smartphone growth.) Image by @boetter via Flickr
Ever-improving networks and a big hardware announcement that will send handset prices plummeting both point to smartphone growth in 2011 that could totally eclipse anything we've seen before.
Smartphones have been growing at an unbelievable clip over the past year but they still account for only around a third of all phones in the US and an even smaller percentage MORE
Seth Weintraub - Dec 22, 2010 2:50 PM ETEvery morning, discover the companies, deals and trends in tech that are moving markets and making headlines. SUBSCRIBE
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