Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), sold over 74.8 million smartphones in Q4 2014 and some agencies analyzing the global smartphone market put the American company on par with Samsung in terms of sales, others offering a slight advantage to the Koreans. Today the people from Gartner come with new results, claiming that Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), sold more smartphones than Samsung in Q4 2014, this being a first for recent years. The difference in sales between Samsung and Apple is 1.8 million units, so minimal, but it exists and places the American company in first place.
With Apple dominating the premium phone market and the Chinese vendors increasingly offering quality hardware at lower prices, it is through a solid ecosystem of apps, content and services unique to Samsung devices that Samsung can secure more loyalty and longer-term differentiation at the high end of the market.
Although Apple is presented that beating Samsung in Q4 2014, for the whole year the Koreans would have generated much higher sales than those from Cupertino. More precisely, Samsung would have sold a little over 307 million smartphones, while Apple would have sold 196 million, so we would be talking about a substantial difference between the companies. The problem with all this calculation is that Samsung never provides sales figures, all the data being simple analysts' estimates of the number of units sold by Samsung worldwide.
To be honest, it's hard to say who won Q4 2014 in terms of sales and without official figures from Samsung, Apple remains the queen in some market studies, Samsung winning others.
