According to the market research firm, Gartner, the global smartphone sales grew by 20.3 per cent in July-September 2014 to reach 301 million units, while the sale of feature phones declined by 25 per cent during the same time period. Gartner has cited the narrow difference in price between feature phones and low-cost smartphones as the key reason for the reduced share of feature phones in the mobile market. The firm added that the high adoption rate of smartphones in the emerging markets of the world will further reduce the size of feature phone market in these markets in the near future.
Gartner has estimated that the sales of smartphones will reach around 1.2 billion units by end-2014. Also, it has forecasted that nine out of 10 mobile handsets in the world will be smartphones by 2018.
From a regional perspective, the emerging markets like Eastern Europe and the Middle East and Africa experienced the highest growth in the sales of smartphones in July-September 2014. Meanwhile, the firm inferred that among the mature markets, US achieved the highest growth in smartphone sales at 18.9 per cent in July-September 2014, while Western Europe saw a decline of 5.2 per cent.
Among the various mobile handset vendors, Samsung continued to lead the market in the quarter ended September 2014. However, its market share fell from 32.1 per cent in July-September 2013 to 24.4 per cent in the corresponding period in 2014.
In the smartphone operating system market, Android continued to lead the market with a share of 83.1 per cent, followed by iOS at 12.7 per cent, Windows at 3 per cent and BlackBerry at 0.8 per cent.
