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Following a record breaking quarter for the tech company, analysts have analyzed the numbers and revealed that Apple ties with Samsung as the largest smartphone maker. They also crowned it the king (or at least one of them) of the fourth quarter in 2014. It looks like Apple finally tied with the South Korean company as king of the market.
During Q4 2014, both companies were able to ship 74.5 mobile phones. However, Apple was still outsold by Samsung regarding the annual total by quite a lot. But those sales meant that both companies now have the same market share of 19.6 percent.
Image source: 9to5mac.com
This is the first time that Apple topped the charts since Q4 2011, analysts say. The market share of Samsung has dropped 8 percent year over year, making analysts from Strategy Analytics to indicate that the company may have to buy competitors such as BlackBerry in order to fight the competition from Apple and Xiaomi. The South Korean company, however, denied it plans to do so.
The next names on the list for quarter four are the Motorola owned company Lenovo and Huawei. But these two rival companies didn’t even come close to Samsung and Apple, both of them having just little over 6 percent of the market share with about 24 million smartphones sold.
The remaining share was claimed by the other companies under the title “Other” with 48 percent of the market.
Image source: 9to5mac.com
The reason why Samsung dropped as low as it did may be the fact that the company hasn’t launched anything original since a long time. The only risk they took recently was with its newest Note device called the Galaxy Note Edge. But even that proved to be only for the South Korean people after a very impressive presentation in September 2014 during the IFA in Berlin.
Samsung is becoming more and more of a joke in the eyes of consumers as they fail to improve its devices as much as it claims to. The company continues to load all its devices with a huge amount of bloatware and they constantly stick to the recipe that made the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note good devices in the past, never going too far from it. Whatever more important features the company added on its devices have already been around for quite some time in other devices before. The Edge was proof that the South Korean company can think outside the box and was well received by people but they chose to remain in the safe zone and not take any risks.
It’s now clear that the company’s trend on relying on the momentum of its sales in the past and position in the market is backfiring and it is why Apple ties with Samsung at the moment.