Although it's by no means a new storyline, the global smartphone market posted another banner quarter in the third quarter. There were several key takeaways from IDC's quarterly report, chief among them being that Apple's and Samsung's rivalry remains as heated as ever.
Source: IDC.
Apple's and Samsung's respective shares of the global smartphone market remained largely unchanged during the third quarter. The third quarter is traditionally a bit of a transitional period for both companies, and that was the case once again. Both Apple and Samsung refreshed their flagship smartphones during the period ahead of the critical holiday quarter that typically generates the greatest percentage of smartphone sales each year.
Aside from seeing Apple and Samsung maintain the status quo, the third quarter also brought a continued surge from three emerging Android-based players that are closely tied to the low-cost emerging-market smartphone boom. As should be the case for some time, Huawei, Lenovo, and LG all continued their booming growth in this space as well.
In all, the third quarter largely kept many of the already present themes in this growth space intact, as tech and telecom analyst Andrew Tonner explains in the following video.
