“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.”
-Steve Jobs, on the release on the Apple iPhone on 9 January, 2007
Looks like the dream of Apple to make the iPhone ‘change everything’ has happened in the cellphone scene. It has been announced by research firm Gartner, that the Apple iPhone now contributes for 7.9% of the worldwide mobile phone sales, ranking it as the third largest cellphone manufacturer. The announcement has been made for the first quarter of 2012. Apple sold nearly 33.1 million iPhones in this period, according to Gartner.
The data issued represents not shipments, but worldwide cellphone sales to customers.
Interestingly, figures increased from the first quarter of 2011, when the Apple sold 16.8 million iPhones. That’s a whopping more than half of this years sales. Back then, Apple had only 3.9 percent of market share.
The results this time for all mobile device manufacturers have been pretty surprising. Tables have turned for the top spot, which has been grabbed by Samsung this time, which ousted Nokia to be rank 1 amongst all cellphone manufacturing companies. Nokia had been market leader since 1998. ZTE trails behind Apple to grab the fourth spot, followed by LG and Huawei and fifth and sixth rank respectively with RIM, Motorola, Sony and HTC be lagging behind.
Surprisingly, the market seems to be ruled by smartphones, with a total of a whopping 144.4 million smartphone handset sold to end users in Q1 of 2012! They have seen an increase of 44.7% year over year.
With steadily growing iPhone sales, looks like Apple is on a roll!
Source: Gartner