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They were neck and neck in 2011, spending 18.6 and 18.8 billion on semiconductors worldwide, but a new Gartner report out today finds that Samsung has pulled ahead of Apple as the world’s biggest chip buyer by a decent margin. According to the research group, Samsung’s chip purchases shot up nearly 29 percent to $23.9 billion in 2012, or 8 percent of the worldwide market, while Apple’s purchases rose 13.6 percent to $21.4 billion, or a share of 7.2 percent. Doing that math, that means the two companies account for over 15 percent of worldwide semiconductor purchases (or more than $45 billion), with each well ahead of runners-up HP, Dell and Sony, who stood at shares of 4.7, 2.9 and 2.7 percent for the year.

Despite the significant growth of those two leaders, though, overall semiconductor purchases actually dropped three percent in 2012 to a total of $297.6 billion. The biggest decline among the top ten companies? That would be Nokia, which fell from fifth to tenth place with chip purchases dropping a whopping 42.6 percent to five billion, compared to 8.6 billion in 2011.

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Mobile, Apple, Samsung, Sony, Nokia, HP, Dell, Lenovo

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Via: Cult of Android, Bloomberg

Source: Gartner

Third quarter figures from Gartner are out, reporting worldwide mobile phone sales slowed again in Q3 2012. Smartphones, however, showed a 46.9 percent increase in sales over the same period last year, with 169.2 million units sold. As you would imagine, Apple and Samsung sold the most, accounting for almost half of all worldwide smartphone purchases. Nokia sales declined during the quarter, and with only 7.2 million of its smartphones filling customers’ hands, its ranking in this segment plummeted from third to seventh (although Gartner expects sales of the new Lumia devices should soften the fall in Q4). In contrast, Apple had a solid quarter, with sales up 36.2 percent year-on-year, which is expected to continue into the fourth quarter as the iPhone 5 launches in more markets. Samsung didn’t do too bad either, increasing sales by 18.6 percent year-on-year thanks to its Galaxy range (although it’s important to note this figure is for total phone sales, not just smartphones). In the OS wars, Android continued to grow its market share up to 72.4 percent, with iOS taking the second spot with 13.9 percent. Stalwart RIM made a leap into the top three with its BlackBerry OS, as aging Symbian saw its usage decline further. If you want to pour over the figures yourself, check out the source below.

Update: We’ve tinkered with the post to remove some confusion between total mobile phone sales and smartphone sales. None of the figures have been changed.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Apple, Samsung, Nokia, RIM

Gartner: smartphone sales up 47 percent in Q3, Android’s OS market share increases (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Nov 2012 03:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We don’t often summarize market share in one word, but: ouch. Both Gartner and IDC have trotted out their preliminary estimates for PC market share in the third quarter, and the two agree that this summer was a dire one for the traditional computer. Outside of ASUS and Lenovo, whose price-focused strategies and key acquisitions kept them ahead of rivals, virtually every major vendor saw its PC shipments collapse versus a year ago, often by more than 10 percent. Total worldwide shipments declined by more than 8 percent in either estimate — enough to make a flat second quarter seem rosy by comparison. Lenovo took the top spot in Gartner’s study, although IDC is counting workstations and kept HP in its usual lead.

As for the US, it’s almost better that we don’t look. Gartner and IDC believe that the American market sank by respective 13.8 or 12.4 percent amounts, and the steep global declines repeated themselves in the one country for everyone but Lenovo. Even a market share gain for Apple came only because its shipments dropped at a gentler rate than most of its peers. Whether it’s the US or worldwide, don’t assume that inventory clearances ahead of Windows 8 were the only factors at work, though. Both research teams point to continuing world economic troubles as influences, and IDC contends that buyers are still skipping PCs in favor of smartphones and mobile tablets. There’s often a jump in computer sales between the summer and the fall, especially with a new OS on the way, but we wouldn’t count on a return to the halcyon days.

Continue reading Gartner and IDC: PC shipments tumbled over 8 percent in Q3, only ASUS and Lenovo escaped unhurt

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Apple, Microsoft, ASUS, HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo

Gartner and IDC: PC shipments tumbled over 8 percent in Q3, only ASUS and Lenovo escaped unhurt originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gartner is the latest of the big analyst houses to release its numbers for smartphone and overall mobile sales in Q2. The picture it paints is one of a market that has, effectively, one winner at the moment: Android — and more specifically Samsung — with growth for Apple’s iPhone “paused” as users hold out for the next iPhone and ride out the tough economy.

Worldwide, there were 419 million phones sold to end users, is down 2.3% compared to a year ago, Gartner says. Just over one-third (36.7%) of all devices sold were smartphones, which continued to grow well even as the wider market (which includes feature phones) declined. Sales of smartphones were up by 42.7% to 154 million units, with Apple and Samsung together accounting for 83% of all smartphone sales.

Within the smartphone category, Android, led by Samsung, is reaping the most benefits from that growth at the moment. With nearly 99 million units sold, Android devices captured 64% of the smartphone market for the quarter (compared to 43.4% a year ago). Samsung’s Galaxy line of devices accounted for more than half of all Android sales, reaching 45.6 million devices sold.

And as a testament to the power of a good, new product launch, the new S3 sold 10 million units in its first two months of its release. “The Galaxy S3 was the best-selling Android product in the quarter and could have been higher but for product shortages,” Gartner notes.

Apple’s iOS-based iPhone devices, meanwhile, also saw growth, selling nearly 29 million units, but this was only in line with overall smartphone market expansion, so its share remained largely the same: it captured 18.8% of the smartphone market (versus 18.2% the year before). Gartner notes that sales of the iPhone fell by 12.6% compared to Q1.

Both Symbian and RIM saw big drops and are both hovering between 5% and 6% market share for sales last quarter, while Samsung’s bada and Microsoft saw modest, single-percentage gains to be level at 2.7% shares (equivalent to around 4 million devices).

Incidentally, do you remember when Nokia said it sold 4 million Lumia devices in Q2? That paints a particularly bad picture for how well the other OEMs are doing with WP7: between the rest of them they sold only about 87,000 devices, according to Gartner’s numbers. Ouch.

Apple’s Tim Cook told us in its Q2 earnings last month that the company was seeing lower iPhone sales in the quarter because of economic presssures, particularly in Europe, as well as a general lag due to people waiting for the new iPhone to hit the market (which by many reports it will do come September). Gartner essentially agrees with this assessment:

“The challenging economic environment and users postponing upgrades to take advantage of high-profile device launches and promotions available later in the year slowed demand across markets,” wrote Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a statement.

But he added that there is a converse to this, too, if the iPhone does in fact launch: “The anticipated Apple iPhone 5, along with Chinese manufacturers pushing 3G and preparing for major device launches in the second half of 2012, will drive the smartphone market upward,” he noted.

That growth, he says, will be primarily in smartphones. Lower-end devices will “continue to see pressure”, even if they continue to sell well in emerging markets.

Indeed, at the moment, it is feature phones that seem to be keeping Nokia alive in terms of phone sales (yes, the platform is burning, but it’s still standing up). While Nokia saw big declines in its smartphone stature — Symbian market share dropped by nearly 17 percentage points, and Windows Phone 7 saw only modest gains — the impact of that was only saw a small decline in overall world rankings, where Nokia now stands at just under 20% market share compared to 23% a year ago. It has feature phones to thank for that.

The picture is different for the world leader: buoyed by its strong sales in smartphones (over half of all devices sold by Samsung) and feature phones, Samsung is playing the game perfectly. It improved its market by nearly five percentage points to 21.6% marketshare, working out to over 90 million units sold. The distance between Samsung/Nokia and the rest of the pack is big at the moment. Apple comes in third but a ways behind with 29 million units. That shows how challenging the mobile market, which needs to operate at scale to be profitable, is at the moment for the majority of the industry.

Google’s Motorola is among the challenged ones. Yesterday the company set out a long-term plan to move away from feature phones to smartphones; it will be worth watching to see how that impacts the company’s standing in the wider rankings — perhaps very little since Motorla has been relying less on feature phone sales than companies like Nokia and Samsung. It took 2.2 percent share of sales in Q2, down 0.2 percentage points from last year.

Tablets and smartphones may be gradually ushering us into a post-PC world, but for now the bigger machines continue to dominate the market. Figures out today from Gartner, focusing on PCs in Europe, note that shipments in the economically-troubled region declined by 2.4% to 13.6 million units in Q2, in a wider global market where growth was flat. Within that, HP kept its lead as the biggest PC maker, while Apple has managed to crack into the top-five PC makers in one market, the UK.

The wider trend seems to be that even in PCs, people are gravitating towards smaller machines. Gartner notes that desk-based units were down by 12.8 percent, but mobile PC shipments (laptops, netbooks) went up by 4%. Similarly, you can see the effects of consumerization at play here: the “professional” PC market is down by 5.3%, while consumer PCs saw a sliver of growth: 0.4%.

Europe accounts for about 16% of the global market for PCs (globally there were 87.5 million PCs shipped in the quarter). In the region, HP currently controls 20% of the market, down from 23 percent in Q2 a year ago. It shipped 2.8 million units, 13% less than last year, while Acer, Asus and Lenovo all grew their shares, with Asus posting the most impressive increase at 42%. HP retained the lead in all individual markets except for Germany, where it dropped to third and Acer now leads. (HP will be reporting quarterly earnings later in the month and that will give us a more accurate picture of what is going on.)

Gartner notes that Dell declined the most among the top-five vendors. It dropped down for third-largest to fourth-largest PC maker, with a share of 8.7 percent (1.2 million units, a decline of 13.6%).

Asus’s rise, Gartner notes, was down to the company offering a wide range of devices between mobile and desktop PCs, as well as Ultrabooks and tablets, “all of which are marketed at attractive prices,” according to Meike Escherich, principal analyst at Gartner. Dell’s decline is partly attributed to how it has largely started to pull away from PC maker to professional services supremo — although it seems to be doing that bang off trend, given the decline in the professional market. (In the UK market, its shift saw Dell lose some 40 percent share in consumer PCs, Gartner pointed out.)

Given that there will be a wave of new machines coming on the market with Windows 8 in the lead-up to the holiday season, if sales don’t pick up now, you may start to see some real bargains on the market. The knock-on effect will be tricky for Microsoft and Windows 8. As a result of the price cut on older machines, “challenges may arise in selling new products into the channel in the third quarter of 2012,” she noted.

As for how individual markets are performing, the rankings are largely a reshuffling of the European top-five, with one notable exception. In the UK, Apple and Toshiba are part of the mix, and Lenovo and Asus are not.

HP retained the top position in the UK, but Apple squeezed in at fifth position with 187 million units sold, for a 7.4% share of the market. Toshiba, meanwhile, saw a very healthy growth of 51.6% for a 0.4 share of the market (238 million units).

Still, the UK was “very weak” in Q2 with an overall decline of 7.6 percent, beating the European average and well below the state of the global market.

And with the move to smartphones and tablets particularly strong in the country — it was one of the first developed markets to have a majority-smartphone penetration among mobile users — PCs might continue to fare poorly even when economic conditions get better:

“The real worry for the UK PC market is whether it will ever return to solid growth,” writes Ranjit Atwal, a Gartner research director. “Windows 8 and Ultrabooks now look even more important. However, messages emerging from the PC supply chain remain inconsistent and largely uninspiring.” He notes that in the UK, the PC channel will be ”holding back on new shipment orders” until Q4 2012 to try to shore up demand.