Federica Laricchia
Research expert covering the global consumer technology industry
Get in touch with us nowSmartphones: a rapid integration with everyday life
The smartphone industry has been steadily developing and growing since 2008, both in market size and in number of models and vendors. Smartphone shipments worldwide added up to around 1.2 billion units in 2022, declining from 2021. By the end of 2022, 68 percent of the world’s population were smartphone users. However, given that many people use more than one smartphone, the actual number of smartphone subscriptions exceeds the number of smartphone users. As of 2022, smartphone owners used an estimated 6.5 billion smartphone subscriptions, which is expected to climb to almost eight billion by 2028.Apple and Samsung lead a competitive field
Samsung held 22.5 percent of the global smartphone market share in the first quarter of 2023. Samsung and Apple tend to swap places at the top of the smartphone market, with Apple smartphone sales typically peaking in the last quarter of the year. The back and forth between Apple and Samsung is typical at the top end of the market, but the fight for the remaining places among the top five vendors is hotly contested. Huawei once had a solid hold on this position, even leading the market for a brief period, but the trade restrictions have taken a heavy toll on the Chinese smartphone manufacturer. Other Chinese firms have filled the gap left by Huawei’s decline. Xiaomi’s smartphone market share in Europe, for example, has increased from ten percent in the first quarter of 2020 to 17 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022.Ongoing dominance is never guaranteed
While the market has two fairly consistent leaders, until early 2011, Nokia was the leading smartphone vendor worldwide, occupying around one quarter of the market. Nokia’s decline shows the importance of keeping ahead of the development curve in an industry at the forefront of tech innovation. A diminished Nokia was once hard to imagine, but the firm’s failure to keep up with the latest trends and new competitors developing the smartphone led Nokia to lag behind.
