Apple now number 2 in worldwide smartphone shipments

By chrisoldroyd
last updated

Market research company, IDC has just released its smartphone market share numbers for the first quarter of 2011 and it clearly shows Apple is only second to Nokia in worldwide shipments.

Apple’s shipments have grown from 8.7 million in 2010 to 18.7 million in 2011 which is an amazing growth of over 114%. In the same period Nokia only managed a 12.6% increase.

Only 6 million units now separate Apple from Nokia. Apple has posted market beating year-on-year growth which has been bolstered this year with the release of the CDMA iPhone for Verizon as well as strong China, South Korea and Saudi markets. Apple’s market share has increased from 15.7% to 18.7% in the last 12 months.

[The Loop]

chrisoldroyd
chrisoldroyd

UK editor at iMore, mobile technology lover and air conditioning design engineer.

19 Comments
  • Cool story bro!!
  • Research in Motion Stocks are falling and I don't see anything bringing it back up. iPhone will eventually dominate the markethttp://surreystore.com/
  • I'm surprised to see Samsung up so much. The Galaxy S line phones must have been more popular than I thought.
  • HTC BABY!!! .. 229% .. It's amazing how far they have come.
  • Notice you don't see android on there. Because it's a os not a Phone. I love how they say android is outselling iPhone. With android being on 400,000 different phones it should be outselling iPhone.
  • I thought the media has been screaming that Android is kicking iPhone's butt in sales?????.....oh that's right, Android is only an operating system and not an actual phone!!!
    Steve Jobs just gets to laugh all the way to the bank...I love it.
  • You love that steve jobs is making money? Android os is kicking ios in the arse. Its apples choice to only have one iphone model. These discussions should all be about platform.
  • this chart is about smart phone companies not smart phone operating systems. The "media" is correct. When you talk about smart phone operating systems Android is growing fastest. You can whine cause they said iphone rather then ios but that's cause apple only sells one phone brand. If they sold ten then they'd refer to it by an os. But apple doesn't. Get over it. It's just a fanboy semantic argument that plays on tech blogs.
  • not entirely. if your going to compare sales from android to iphone then you should be technical. android phones are outselling ios, because android is on hundreds of different phones, that range in different prices and different styles. android is a operating system. iPhone is a phone, 1, single, phone. how can you compare sales of an operating system to sales of a device? its not a correct way of wording it, and saying that android is outselling iphone is incorrect. im pretty sure you could take the most popular android phone, perhaps the droid x, not sure because i dont keep up on the stuff other than iphone, because frankly i dont care that much, but im pretty sure if you compare the 2 then iphone will have the most sales...
  • (Excuse if multiple posts, but I am trying to figure out exactly why none of my comments are showing up, despite system even giving me "duplicate comment" messages)
    Congratulations to Apple (and Samsung, HTC, and, of course, "Others") -- but the most amazing statistic is obscured in the article -- the explosive growth of the smartphone market overall. Going off Nokia's numbers, there were 55.4 million smartphones shipped in 2010, but 99.6 million smartphones shipped in 2011.
    And 80% increase in the overall size of the market for a luxury item during the midst of a global recession is nothing short of astounding, and shows just how hungry the public is for smartphones.
  • Ah...it appears that, whether intentionally or not, comments with my typical email address "dev@null.com" are being immediately trashed, without an error message.
  • It's crazy to think that Apple sells only three different phones (the 16 & 32 gig iPhone 4 and the 8 gig 3GS) yet they are still able to hold the number two spot in phone sales! That's success right there
  • I ain't talking poultry when I say those other companies are frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeedddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd
  • Haha +1!!!
  • Is the title correct? Those numbers look like mobile phone shipments, not smartphone shipments. Nokia's smartphone sales wouldn't be that high.
  • If it was cellphones Nokia would have a LOT higher numbers and we'd probably see a breakout for LG as well.
  • apple can make money all they want but it's naive to think people evaluating strength in the smartphone market would ignore a situation where the iphone (merely a proxy for ios phones) declines in market share while (android phones increase). The investors will invest somewhere else. The same reason they've flooded out of declining market share blackberry and into apple or component makers like qualcomm or skyworks. The same would happen to apple.
    this tech blog battle of semantics between android fanboys and apple fanboys misses the point that the so called "media" you're referring too is doing analytics for the business and investor market and hedge fund managers to use when making investment decisions not cause they want phone geeks to have bragging rights.
    it's laughable that phone geeks actually think these market share numbers are about them and their fanboy battles.
  • Only Samsung and HTC have more sales than the "others" category .... thanks to ANDROID
  • What's crazy is that apple is shipping that many smartphones when they only have like two models (iPhone 3GS and 4), and the 3GS is essentially gone too.