700 million smartphones shipped out last year, 30% of them were Samsung

The beginning of a new year sees a plethora of reports and statistics detailing the performance of various smartphone companies over the past year. This time it’s the turn of Strategy Analytics, who has published a report looking at the total number of units shipped by each manufacturer in the smartphone market.

The report found that a massive 1.6 billion mobile phones were shipped out across the globe in 2012, 700 million of which were smartphones. The report also shows us who the most dominant manufacturers were last year.

Not surprisingly, Strategy Analytics’ findings match what we’ve been seeing in all of the recent reports. Samsung managed to top the table of manufacturers with 213 million smartphone handsets shipped out over the course of 2012. Impressively, Samsung more than doubled the amount of units shipped in 2011, up from an already respectable 97.4 million smartphones last year. They also managed a strong Q4, with 63 million units dispatched over the final portion of last year, trumping Q4 2011′s 36.5 million handsets, and beating all the other manufacturers by quite a margin.

The data also shows the percentage of market share owned by each of the top manufacturers for the past two years. The most interesting statistic is probably that Apple kept a relatively stable market share from 2011 to 2012, with 19.0% and 19.4% respectively. Samsung on the other hand managed a substantial increase in their share, leaping from a 19.9% market share in 2011 to a massive 30% share by the end of 2012. So we can file this report as another which indicates that Apple might be starting to reach saturation with some of its products. At the very least we can conclude that growth for iPhone products is certainly starting to struggle.

Sadly for Nokia, the third largest individual manufacturer appeared to have a very poor year, dropping to a meager 5% share of the global smartphone market last year and only shipping out 35 million units. Whilst that’s still a large number, it’s a more than 50% reduction in their performance compared with 2011, and their market share dropped by staggering 68% in a single year.

Other manufactures still make up a significant portion of the global smartphone market, shipping out 45% of all handsets last year. So we’re not at the stage where any company monopolizes the market yet. But this data reaffirms what we’ve witness throughout 2012, Samsung is clearly moving into the dominant position in the market, whilst Apple is struggling to maintain its rate of growth. We can also conclude that the gap between the market leaders, Samsung and Apple, continues to grow.