The latest smartphone sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, for the three months to March 2014, shows Apple performed strongly in the first quarter of the year, with sales bouncing back in Europe, Japan and Australia.
Across Europe, Android remained the top OS with 70.7% share, while Apple helds second position at 19.2%. Windows, at third, accounted for 8.1% of smartphone sales.
Dominic Sunnebo, strategic insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, said in a statement, “Apple regained ground in the first quarter of 2014, primarily due to the strong performance of the iPhone 5S, growing its sales share in Europe, Japan and Australia. By contrast, Windows had a tough start to the year as a result of its entry-level Nokia models facing fierce competition from low-end Motorola, LG and Samsung Android smartphones.”
Apple has been particularly successful in Japan where, in Q114, it secured 42% of smartphone sales on NTT DoCoMo, 59% on KDDI AU and 81% on Softbank. The design of the iPhone (30%) remains the key draw for Japanese consumers, followed by its 4G capability (29%) and the belief that it will be reliable (24%).
Smartphone OS Sales Share, January-March 2014:
Sunnebo continued: “Japan’s love affair with Apple shows no sign of fading. Even though the iPhone has now been available on Japan’s largest carrier, NTT DoCoMo, for a number of months Apple still accounts for more than 40% of sales on the network. The success of the iPhone is also filtering through to the iPad, with almost a quarter of Japanese iPhone owners also owning an iPad. With smartphone penetration in Japan lagging well behind Europe and the US, Japan will remain a key growth market for Apple.”
In China, phablet growth continues unabated. Devices with a screen larger than 5” made up 40% of smartphone sales in March.
Sunnebo commented: “It’s clear that phablets really are changing the way Chinese consumers use smartphones. More than one in five phablet owners now watch mobile TV on a daily basis, half do so at least once a month, and this is without widespread availability of 4G. As 4G infrastructure expands in China, the demand for data is going to be unprecedented, paving the way for carriers to boost revenues significantly through larger data packages.”
Smartphone % penetration in Great Britain stands at 71% in March, with 88% of devices sold in the past three months being smartphones.
*The big five European markets includes UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Source: Kantar Worldpanel ComTech
MacDailyNews Take: Time for Beleaguered BlackBerry to join the “Other” category, Kantar – or, in the interest of accuracy, just start a new “Joke” category for them.
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Analyst: Apple iPhone took 87.4% of mobile phone profits in Q4 – February 11, 2014
This data is highly inaccurate, so all movements up and down make no much of significance.
As soon as an anal….yst says marketshare or uses it in his charts, you know they have NO real knowledge and are just spouting numbers. just saying.
When I say something on a forum or blog, I mean it! I can’t stand mamby pamby endings like ” . . . just saying” because it means that you don’t believe in it enough to stand behind it. It is a lily liver way to back out of your beliefs and pretend that you didn’t really mean anything by it. It makes your whole statement become JUST NOISE!
Still don’t like all these smartphone marketshare charts that lump HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sony and Amazon together and call them one thing, and then compare that one thing to Apple. Android device manufacturers aren’t one company that is competing only with Apple. They are separate companies with distinct hardware and different skins on their different versions of Android. They are competing with one another just as much as they are competing with Apple.
I don’t see the use of lumping all Android device manufacturers together when they don’t even all use the same versions of Android and some don’t even have access to Google’s app store…and even if they do, there’s no guarantee any given app is going to run on your particular Android handset.
That’s because they don’t want to see Apple at the top.
Wonder why Italy keeps declining against the general trend. As they seem so tied in with the concept of style even if its generally over the top gaudy naff glitzy sort of style one would have thought a phone deemed so stylish with a great image would appeal. But then perhaps I have answered my own question there with the type of style they like.
This data is 6 to 9 months old. Why bring it up now? Data was through March 2014.
6 month old story
??
this is Kantar’s latest data. It always trails 6 months
Its true that with the right spin you can make anything seem positive. They’re all about the q1 and only in certain parts of the world. They don’t mention that so far for 2014 ios has actually lost market share.