Q2 2013 is a fiscal quarter worth remembering, because for the first time in history, smartphone sales beat the sales of classic mobile phones. Specifically, smartphone sales accounted for 51.8% of total mobile phone sales worldwide, Androidrepresenting 79% of that figure. It was expected that this would happen sooner or later, but here everything came sooner and came with problems for Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),, the company's market share falling significantly compared to the same period last year.
Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 435 million units in the second quarter of 2013, an increase of 3.6 percent from the same period last year, according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide smartphone sales to end users reached 225 million units, up 46.5 percent from the second quarter of 2012. Sales of feature phones to end users totaled 210 million units and declined 21 percent year-over-year. "Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe exhibited the highest smartphone growth rates of 74.1 percent, 55.7 percent and 31.6 percent respectively, as smartphone sales grew in all regions.
In total, 435 million mobile phones were sold worldwide, and 225 million of these were smartphones, the remaining 210 million being classic mobile terminals. If the number of smartphones sold increased by 46.5% compared to the same period last year, in the case of classic phones we are talking about a 21% decrease in sales. In the future, the discrepancy in sales between the two types of mobile phones will be even greater as more and more users choose smart phones.
