Apple Becomes World’s Leading Smartphone Maker in Terms of Volume, Ending Samsung’s 12-Year Dominance

Apple finally overtook Samsung in 2023 as the world's leading smartphone producer by volume after 12 years of the latter's dominance because of the factor that customers are upgrading to more expensive models.

Apple Surpassing Samsung

In a report by the research organization International Data Corporation (IDC), Apple was the only major smartphone maker to see yearly unit growth last year. In 2023, Apple's sales increased by 3.7% to 234.6 million, surpassing Samsung's 226.6 million.

With device sales declining 3.2% to 1.17 billion units, IDC said this was the worst year for the smartphone industry in a decade, and that was before Apple's boost.

Apple has long been the leading smartphone manufacturer in terms of sales and earnings, mostly due to the iPhone's supremacy in the high-end market. However, it was only last year that it also topped the charts in terms of volume.

As cheaper Android phone companies had faster growth and Huawei reclaimed market share in China, Samsung recorded a 13.6% decline in sales last year.

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Smartphone Market Leader

Amber Liu, a manager at the research group Canalys, reported on Tuesday, January 16, that Apple was ranked as the market leader in 2023. Liu added that Samsung lost market share in the low-end segment and its leading position in the global market because it focused on the mid-to-high-end segment for profitability.

According to the Financial Times, Canalys said smartphone sales rose by around 8% year over year in the fourth quarter, ending a string of seven straight quarters of loss due to increasing demand from holiday shoppers.

As investors worried about Apple's iPhone sales in China, Microsoft surpassed Apple to become the most valuable public corporation in the world last week, as reported by Reuters.

On the other hand, data from IDC showed that after the announcement of Apple's newest models in September 2023, sales of the iPhone jumped 11.6% in the quarter ending in December of that year.

Since Samsung surpassed Nokia, LG, and BlackBerry to become the market leader in 2011, the smartphone rankings have seen dramatic changes. There has been a noticeable decline in the frequency of consumer device upgrades as a result of the maturation of smartphone technology and the introduction of more incremental features.

To Apple's advantage, the company has increased the price of its iPhones in recent years due to the fact that more and more consumers are upgrading to more costly and powerful smartphones when they replace their phones.

Nabila Popal, research director at IDC, explained: "Apple's ongoing success and resilience is in large part due to the increasing trend of premium devices, which now represent over 20 [percent] of the market, fuelled by aggressive trade-in offers and interest-free financing plans."

The quick expansion in developing economies caused low-end Android companies to see tremendous growth in the second half of 2023, but Apple emerged as the clear victor, Popal added.