Market share

Smartphone market share

For several years, demand for advanced mobile devices boasting powerful processors and graphics processing units, abundant storage (flash memory) for applications and media files, high-resolution screens with multi-touch capability, and open operating systems has outpaced the rest of the mobile phone market.^[180]
According to an early 2010 study by ComScore, over 45.5 million people in the United States owned smartphones out of 234 million total subscribers.^[181] Despite the large increase in smartphone sales in the last few years, smartphone shipments only made up 20% of total handset shipments as of the first half of 2010.^[182]
According to Gartner in their report dated November 2010, total smartphone sales doubled in one year and now smartphones represent 19.3 percent of total mobile phone sales.^[183] Smartphone sales increased in 2010 by 72.1 percent from the prior year, whereas sales for all mobile phones only increased by 31.8 percent.^[184][185]
According to an Olswang report in early 2011, the rate of smartphone adoption is accelerating: as of March 2011 22% of UK consumers had a smartphone, with this percentage rising to 31% amongst 24- to 35-year-olds.^[186]
In March 2011, Berg Insight reported data that showed global smartphone shipments increased 74% from 2009 to 2010.^[187]
A survey of mobile users in the United States by Nielsen in Q3, 2011 reports that smartphone ownership has reached 43% of all U.S. mobile subscribers, with the vast majority of users under the age of 44 owning one. In the 25-34 age range smartphone ownership is reported to be at 62%.^[188] NPD Group reports that the share of handset sales that were smartphones in Q3, 2011 reached 59% for consumers 18 and over in the U.S.^[189]
In profit share worldwide smartphones now far exceed the share of non-smartphones. According to a November 2011 research note from Canaccord Genuity, Apple Inc., which doesn't make phones that aren't smartphones, holds 52% of the total mobile industry's operating profits, while only holding 4.2% of the global handset market. HTC and RIM similarly only make smartphones and their wordwide profit shares are at 9% and 7%, respectively. Samsung, in second place after Apple at 29%, makes both smartphones and feature phones and doesn't report a breakdown separating their profits between the two kinds of devices, but it can be intuited that a significant portion of that profit comes from their flagship smartphone devices.^[190]