Mobile-phone sales slowing, but not in Asia-Pacific: Gartner

Asia-Pacific was the only region to register growth in mobile-phone sales in the first quarter, with a 6.4 per cent increase compared with the same period in 2012. North America (-9.5 per cent), Latin America (-3.8 per cent), and the Europe, Middle East and Africa market (-3.6 per cent) all declined, as did Japan (-7.3 per cent).

“More than 226 million mobile phones were sold to end users in Asia-Pacific in the first quarter of 2013, which helped the region increase its share of global mobile phones to 53.1 percent year-on-year,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner.

China alone now accounts for 25.7 per cent of global sales and saw its sales increase 7.5 per cent in the first quarter.

Asia's strong sales were enough to power a slight global increase despite the falling sales in other regions; worldwide mobile phone sales totalled nearly 426 million units in the first quarter, up 0.7 per cent over the same period last year, according to Gartner.

The worldwide smartphone market (a subset of the overall mobile-phone market) saw 210 million units sold, an increase of 42.9 per cent over the first quarter of 2012.

"In the smartphone market, local and Chinese manufacturers are making faster inroads, as they account for 29 per cent share in the first quarter of 2013, up from 13.2 per cent a year ago,” Gupta said.

Brands and operating systems

Samsung consolidated its leads in both the overall market and the smartphone category. In the overall market, the Korean brand sold 110.6 million units, far ahead of its nearest rival Nokia, which sold 63.2 million. Samsung increased its market-share lead in the overall category from 21.1 to 23.6 per cent . In the smartphone category, Samsung sold 64.7 million units, increasing its market-share lead over Apple from 27.6 to 30.8 per cent (Apple sold 38.3 million units).

Nokia's market share fell from 19.7 per cent a year ago to 14.8 per cent, while Apple's rose from 7.8 per cent a year ago to 9.0 per cent. LG, Huawei, Sony, and Lenovo all held their relatively meagre shares constant. HTC no longer appears in the top 10.

Thanks in no small part to Samsung, Android increased its overwhelming lead in the operating-system market from 56.9 per cent to 74.4 per cent year-over-year; Android powered 156.2 million of the phones sold in the first quarter, and the next closest competitor was Apple's iOS with 38.3 million.

From there it's a steep drop to the next operating system—and getting steeper, as the Blackberry OS saw its market share slip from 6.8 per cent a year ago to 3.0 per cent, despite the much-awaited release of its newest version.