Dropping Prices Fuel Migration to Smartphones, Gartner Says

said. Apple was tops, selling 75 million units, stealing the top spot from Samsung (73 million), which had owned the market since 2011, it said. Samsung lost roughly 10 percentage points in market share in Q4 versus the year-ago quarter, continuing a downward trend since its peak in Q3 2013, said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst: "Samsung continues to struggle to control its falling smartphone share.” Analyst Roberta Cozza cited Apple’s dominance at the premium end of the smartphone market and pressure from Chinese vendors offering “quality hardware at lower prices” at the lower end as challenges for Samsung. A “solid ecosystem of apps, content and services unique to Samsung devices” will be necessary for the Korean vendor to secure customer loyalty and provide long-term differentiation at the high end, she said. Lenovo’s share of the end-user market -- including Motorola and Lenovo devices following the companies’ transaction in October -- ranked third in Q4, reaching 24.3 million units, giving it 7 percent of the global smartphone market, followed by Huawei at 6 percent share and Xiaomi with 5 percent share. Xiaomi’s unit sales to end users nearly tripled to 18.5 million units in the quarter, while its market share more than doubled, Gartner said. Apple’s best-ever quarter -- Q4 2014 with 74.8 million smartphones sold -- was buoyed by “huge demand” in China and the U.S., where sales leaped by 56 percent and 88 percent, respectively, Gartner said. The larger screen sizes of the iPhone 6 models presented new users a “strong alternative to Android,” Gartner said. Huawei and Xiaomi, meanwhile, propped up their sales in the mid- and low-end smartphone markets at home and overseas, it said. "Chinese vendors are no longer followers," Cozza said. "They are producing higher quality devices with appealing new hardware features that can rival the more established players in the mobile phone market.” Dropping prices drove the migration of feature phone users to smartphones last year, Gartner said. The Android ecosystem benefited most from the transition, growing 2.2 percentage points for 2014 to 80.7 percent share, followed by iOS at 15.4 percent share. Windows Phone's performance was basically flat in Q4, selling 35 million units, but it recorded strong results in some markets in Europe -- and in the business segment, Gartner said. Windows Phone held 2.8 percent market share for the quarter, while BlackBerry came in under 1 percent at roughly 8 million units, it said.