Samsung isn’t doing well in its international patent infringement battle against Apple, but the South Korean electronics manufacturer may have something else to smile about: Samsung has dethroned Apple as the world’s largest smartphone company by volume of units sold, according to a preliminary report in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
Samsung shipped 20 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, according to the Journal’s sources, compared to Apple’s 17.07 million fourth quarter sales. As Apple Insider points out, that’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison (pun unintended), as shipments, of course, aren’t the same thing as sales.
But it is pretty close, as Apple’s sales numbers indicate the devices the company has sold to distributors, not to end users. During its earnings call it was revealed Apple “actually sold approximately 17.25 million units to end users.”
Meanwhile, Samsung hasn’t yet posted its official fourth-quarter earnings (third quarter on the company’s fiscal calendar) and won’t until October 28. Even then, the company is highly unlikely to list its smartphone shipment numbers. The company announced in July that it would stop the practice of disclosing such numbers because “as competition intensifies, there are increased risks that the information we provide may adversely affect our own businesses,” Robert Yi, Samsung’s chief of investor relations said on an earnings call, The Journal reported. But if sales are larger than expected, Samsung may change its mind and share the numbers anyway as bragging rights.
Apple had only been at the top of the smartphone sales mountain for one quarter, and the way sales of the iPhone 4S are going (a record-setting 4 million in its first weekend of availability), the company may yet retake the top spot from Samsung again in the first quarter of 2012.
Of course, the back-and-forth between Apple and Samsung is just the most visible manifestation of the wider war between Apple and Google, and more specifically, Apple’s locked-down mobile operating system iOS and Google’s open-source Android, the latest version of which, Ice Cream Sandwich, premiered on Tuesday and is due in November. In that contest, Android is beating Apple globally by a wide margin (46.8 million units to Apple’s 19.6 million units in 2011, according to Gartner) and is expected to continue grow and challenge Symbian for the title of the number one mobile OS in the world by 2014.
