While we have yet to hear from Samsung on the exact unit sales it made in the fourth quarter, research firm Strategy Analytics has released a new report claiming that the Korean juggernaut may have sold as many as 86 million smartphones in the previous quarter alone. If this is true, or even close to the truth, then Samsung smartphone sales will have overtaken Apple’s by a huge margin. Cupertino has announced its Q1 2014 results, posting record unit sales of 51 million iPhones, though narrowly missing analysts’ expectations of 55 million unit sales.
The data shows that Samsung now holds over 29.6 percent of the global smartphone market, comfortably ahead of Apple’s 17.6 percent. Bringing up the rear are various Chinese vendors, which continued their onslaught against the low-end and mid-range markets, with Huawei and Lenovo selling 16.6 million and 13.6 million smartphones during the quarter, capturing 5.7 and 4.7 percent of the market respectively. Total smartphone shipments in the year 2013 are found to have crossed 319.8 million units for Samsung and 153.5 million units for Apple, taking up 32.2 percent and 15.5 percent of the global smartphone market respectively. Linda Sui, analyst at Strategy Analytics, believes that both Samsung and Apple will have to “fight hard” this year if they want to stop upcoming challengers from chipping away at their market shares.