Apple still dominates US smartphone market, Samsung inches up

Posted:
in iPhone edited January 2014
In its monthly smartphone survey for the three months ending in October, comScore found Apple adding to its dominant U.S. smartphone market lead with over 40 percent of all subscribers, while Samsung surpassed the 25 percent mark.

comScore
Source: comScore


Market research firm comScore released the results of its MobiLens survey on Thursday, showing moderate gains for Apple in the U.S., with a 0.2 percent jump from July. At the end of October, 40.6 percent of the country's smartphone owners used an iPhone.

Samsung came in second with 25.4 percent of the market, a 1.3 percent boost from three months ago. Out of the top-five smartphone manufacturers, the Korean company showed the largest rise over the period.

Motorola jumped into the No. 3 seat as HTC and LG both posted losses of 1.3 percent and 0.2 percent, respectively. The Google subsidiary was up 0.1 percent to end October with a 7 percent share of the market.

Looking at smartphone platforms, the survey saw Android, iOS and Windows all gaining users over the three-month period, with Google's OS gaining 0.4 percent to account for 52.2 percent of all U.S. subscribers. Since Apple fields only iOS devices, the company came in with the same numbers posted above, while BlackBerry lost 0.7 percent as the flailing company continues to sink.

comScore


Microsoft's mobile Windows platform added 0.2 points to its 3 percent marketshare, good enough for fourth, while Symbian fell to a 0.2 percent share as it slowly bleeds out.

While the breakdown did not mention Apple's iPhone 5s and 5c launch in September, the mid-survey debut likely helped push the company's numbers. With supply for the top-end iPhone 5s just recently catching up with demand after initial constraints, Apple's marketshare may be primed to rise again, especially over the holiday shopping season.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 19
    clemynxclemynx Posts: 1,552member
    I'm surprised they are still gaining at this point. Not that it'd be a problem if their market was coming down, which'll happen eventually even in the US.
  • Reply 2 of 19
    clemynx wrote: »
    I'm surprised they are still gaining at this point. Not that it'd be a problem if their market was coming down, which'll happen eventually even in the US.

    It is also possible Apple's market share will keep on growing in the USA and the rest of the world.

    It is kind of interesting to see that the iPhone is not bring sold by as many telephone carriers as Android phones and the largest Android phone shipper has been talking about high-end saturation and slow downs throughout the year while Apple keeps talking about opportunities for larger sales.

    It just might be possible for Apple to do what Android has not... Stay in the high end, have real high end sales, earn real high end money, and earn real high end profits that are greater than or equal to all the Android partners combined.

    Go, Appple!!!!!
  • Reply 3 of 19
    bonkybonky Posts: 19member
    Disappointing numbers considering the 9M launch weekend. Would have expected iOS to trounce Android.
  • Reply 4 of 19
    snovasnova Posts: 1,281member
    funny.. Sammy ate HTC. Apple ate LG. and Motorola pulled market share out of a dark place.
  • Reply 5 of 19
    snovasnova Posts: 1,281member

    bonky wrote:

    "Disappointing numbers considering the 9M launch weekend. Would have expected iOS to trounce Android."

     

     

    remind me again how long 5S and 5C was on the market at Oct 2013?

  • Reply 6 of 19
    chris_cachris_ca Posts: 2,543member
    Isn't "other"" supposed to be like 48% of the market?
  • Reply 7 of 19
    normmnormm Posts: 653member
    If you look at the original article, you can see that Apple now has 25.4% of all cell phone subscribers in the US (40.6% of 62.5% of all subscribers). That's up from 25.1% only a month earlier, 17.5% Sept 2012, and 10.2% Sept 2011. As Horace Dediu has pointed out, this growth makes a nice straight line on a log plot of penetration/nonpenetration versus time. That's what exponential growth looks like in a finite market. iPhone is still on track to pass combined Android phones next year.
  • Reply 8 of 19
    slurpyslurpy Posts: 5,386member
    Impressive, considering the only fucking phones carriers advertise and push are Samsung phones. Seriously, every fucking ad is a Samsung phone. You'd think that's all they carry.
  • Reply 9 of 19
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Slurpy View Post



    Impressive, considering the only fucking phones carriers advertise and push are Samsung phones. Seriously, every fucking ad is a Samsung phone. You'd think that's all they carry.

     

    In case you haven’t heard Samsung is paying out their ass for advertising. Something like $14 billion to Apple’s $1 billion. That’s why the carriers are pushing Samsung. And they’re not having as dramatic an effect as they thought they would, hence the “crisis conference” being planned. Samsung ads are literally everywhere you look or go and people are growing immune to them apparently. I think Sammy has peaked and may be starting to stall out. 

  • Reply 10 of 19
    arlorarlor Posts: 533member

    It's a shame HTC can't get its act together. Their phones are nicer than Samsung's in my experience.

  • Reply 11 of 19
    arlorarlor Posts: 533member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by lkrupp View Post

     

     

    In case you haven’t heard Samsung is paying out their ass for advertising. Something like $14 billion to Apple’s $1 billion.  


     

    I'm not quite clear on this number. Is that Samsung's total corporate advertising? Because they have a hugely wider variety of product lines than Apple, in addition to have about half as much again total revenue. Samsung may not be selling as many cell phones in the US, but Apple isn't selling any TVs, washing machines, aircraft parts, etc., etc. More product lines means more advertising. 

     

    It would be more instructive to know how much each company is spending advertising the products that they directly compete on. In that regard, I at least certainly don't see 14x as much advertising for Samsung's phones in my daily life. But then I live in a small town in the Midwest, stream almost all my entertainment, and don't really see much advertising at all. 

  • Reply 12 of 19
    lkrupp wrote: »
    In case you haven’t heard Samsung is paying out their ass for advertising. Something like $14 billion to Apple’s $1 billion. That’s why the carriers are pushing Samsung. And they’re not having as dramatic an effect as they thought they would, hence the “crisis conference” being planned. Samsung ads are literally everywhere you look or go and people are growing immune to them apparently. I think Sammy has peaked and may be starting to stall out. 

    I don't remember the number but Microsoft threw some serious money away trying to promote the Nokia/MS phones. Samsung and Microsoft have both set up programs that pays the carrier AND the retail salesperson to steer people to their products. Which is a very powerful way to build sales, however, since Apple hasn't done that it would be further evidence that the users WANT the iPhone quite a bit more than the competition. Furthermore, as we all saw with Verizon and Domoco users will leave their current carrier, even if they are the dominate carrier, to get an iPhone.

    If you can not blow the competition away with massive advertising, then the public can't be fooled, your products suck, and everyone knows it.
  • Reply 13 of 19
    arlor wrote: »
    I'm not quite clear on this number. Is that Samsung's total corporate advertising? Because they have a hugely wider variety of product lines than Apple, in addition to have about half as much again total revenue. Samsung may not be selling as many cell phones in the US, but Apple isn't selling any TVs, washing machines, aircraft parts, etc., etc. More product lines means more advertising. 

    It would be more instructive to know how much each company is spending advertising the products that they directly compete on. In that regard, I at least certainly don't see 14x as much advertising for Samsung's phones in my daily life. But then I live in a small town in the Midwest, stream almost all my entertainment, and don't really see much advertising at all. 

    When was the last time you ever saw a Samsung washing machine ad? Fact is, Samsung doesn't advertise commodity products. There is just no return in doing that. From every article I can find, the 14 billion dollar number seems to be the breakout for phones only.
  • Reply 14 of 19
    hill60hill60 Posts: 6,992member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Arlor View Post

     

    It's a shame HTC can't get its act together. Their phones are nicer than Samsung's in my experience.


     

    There are fourteen billion reasons why and that is called Samsung's marketing budget, HTC just can't compete with such overhyped handsets.

  • Reply 15 of 19
    hill60hill60 Posts: 6,992member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Macky the Macky View Post





    When was the last time you ever saw a Samsung washing machine ad? Fact is, Samsung doesn't advertise commodity products. There is just no return in doing that. From every article I can find, the 14 billion dollar number seems to be the breakout for phones only.

     

    I've seen a few ads for Samsung vacuum cleaners which could be a case of making hay while the sun shines due to Dyson suing them over Samsung's usual method of "innovation" which could bring their vacuum cleaner sales to a grinding halt.

  • Reply 16 of 19
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by lkrupp View Post

     

     

    In case you haven’t heard Samsung is paying out their ass for advertising. Something like $14 billion to Apple’s $1 billion. That’s why the carriers are pushing Samsung. And they’re not having as dramatic an effect as they thought they would, hence the “crisis conference” being planned. Samsung ads are literally everywhere you look or go and people are growing immune to them apparently. I think Sammy has peaked and may be starting to stall out. 


    $14B?

     

    That's a bit of an exaggeration?

  • Reply 17 of 19
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member

    I have mixed feelings about Samsung. I think the Galaxy is an obvious copy of the iPhone and they should have been punished for it more severely than they were but, on the other hand, they're not junk merchants. Some of their appliances, monitors, SSDs I have bought have been very good.

     

    I think Samsung pretty much getting away with copying the iPhone is an important lesson for Apple. Microsoft copied the Mac, and after that Apple formed this mythology that if only they had had the proper patents/legal protection, it wouldn't have been allowed to happen, and they would have won the personal computer wars. Well, with the iPhone they had the benefit of experience, and did everything right, Steve Jobs even pointing out in the iPhone introductory keynote that everything was patented up the wazoo, and still the competitor still got away with copying.

     

    This has implications for the future of Apple. Basically whatever market they enter/create they will never legally be able to stop competitors copying their designs, cheapening the design somewhat, and taking the lower 90% of the market. They will be able to keep the top/cream 10% because they continue to innovate, and those people at the top can afford the latest, and it takes time to copy. But it has implications for the Mac too: far from being the poor cousin Apple product that fell to a small percentage of the market, it is just a "normal" Apple product.

  • Reply 18 of 19
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by StruckPaper View Post

     

    $14B?

     

    That's a bit of an exaggeration?


     

    http://www.dailytech.com/Samsung+Breaks+the+Bank+w+14B+in+Advertising+But+is+it+Trying+Too+Hard/article33846c.htm

     

    I don’t think so.

  • Reply 19 of 19
    These figures purport to give a level of accuracy which they clearly are not capable of. Any high school student would ask, where in the table or footnotes is the margin of error noted?
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