News - Apple becomes world’s fourth biggest mobile phone company

[HEXUS]

Closes in on LG for third place.

Read more.

[aidanjt]

Is that all? You would think from all the massive exaggerations and hyperbole, Apple was somewhere in orbit over everyone else.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

ZTE seem to be doing quite well at the lower end of the market. However,it seems that the figures for HTC are missing??

Edit!!

From the article:

"Vendor shipments are branded shipments and exclude OEM sales for all vendors."

[Scott B]

ZTE seem to be doing quite well at the lower end of the market. However,it seems that the figures for HTC are missing??

Edit!!

From the article:

"Vendor shipments are branded shipments and exclude OEM sales for all vendors."

Also, note how big the 'others' category is. I'd be surprised if HTC wasn't the biggest of the others.

ZTE's figures can be explained by the Chinese market alone.

[Merson]

Is that all? You would think from all the massive exaggerations and hyperbole, Apple was somewhere in orbit over everyone else.

Think most of that comes from the fact they only ever sell 2 core models of iphone's at any given time. Even accounting for GSM/CDMA, white/black & 16/32GB that only 9 phones they retail each year. How many do Samsung, LG and the like produce and market at any given time? Hundreds i suspect. Which makes apples figures impressive. I imagine on sales per single device apple are in orbit with the 4.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Also, not how big the 'others' category is. I'd be surprised if HTC wasn't the biggest of the others.

ZTE's figures can be explained by the Chinese market alone.

Your right the others category does seem quite big. ZTE does seem to be expanding outside of China too with products like the Blade becoming reasonably popular budget handset. But TBH,the Chinese market is pretty large like you said and ZTE does have quite strong links with the Chinese government too.

[Blackmage]

What apple need to produce is a lower cost iphone around £200.

How would they go about this though? surely the 3gs must cost less than 200 to build?

[Merson]

If extremely scarce rumours are to be believed this is what is happening.

http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=14900

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If extremely scarce rumours are to be believed this is what is happening.

http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=14900

If the rumour is true it should help shake up the £100 to £200 market a bit more and it would also help Apple move into more budget conscience markets too. Sharing parts with a more expensive model will also bring economies of scale too. It would be interesting to see how much the cheaper model would share in hardware when compared to the next iPod Touch.

[mrochester]

This is an amazing achievment when you think that Apple only entered the phone market in 2007. It's a massive embarrassment for the industry stalwarts to be so swiftly and massively usurped.

[paul18james]

This is really gr8 news Guys...So Apple is ultimately climbing up the ladder steadily....

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems that only LG has actually sold less units than last year.

[Unique]

This is an amazing achievment when you think that Apple only entered the phone market in 2007. It's a massive embarrassment for the industry stalwarts to be so swiftly and massively usurped.

and add to that it's one of the most expensive series of phones out there, and most other phones copy it in at least a small way, but typically fairly similarly, so you can easily get a phone that does pretty much everything for a lot less money, and you have android competing thats used by a number of different phone makers, so to beat all that lot with a more expensive phone is pretty impressive

[Hicks12]

dont forget apple copied alot of its features and got many ideas off other companies so its swings and roundabouts in terms of copying .

Also, no HTC mentioned (as Cat said above)... why? If this source can be trusted: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...8?feedType=RSS
That says HTC overtook Nokia in market share so HTC have actually be the BEST performing company in terms of phone market, Besting nokia in a fairly short space of time... they been around for a fair while (10 years or so i think) and since smart phones really took off(they were one of the first, especially with touchscreen tech ) then it seems their performance just went massively up hill.

[mrochester]

dont forget apple copied alot of its features and got many ideas off other companies so its swings and roundabouts in terms of copying .

Also, no HTC mentioned (as Cat said above)... why? If this source can be trusted: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...8?feedType=RSS
That says HTC overtook Nokia in market share so HTC have actually be the BEST performing company in terms of phone market, Besting nokia in a fairly short space of time... they been around for a fair while (10 years or so i think) and since smart phones really took off(they were one of the first, especially with touchscreen tech ) then it seems their performance just went massively up hill.

No HTC because they didn't sell enough to be in the top 5. They'll be in the 'others' section.

[Scott B]

dont forget apple copied alot of its features and got many ideas off other companies so its swings and roundabouts in terms of copying .

Also, no HTC mentioned (as Cat said above)... why? If this source can be trusted: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...8?feedType=RSS
That says HTC overtook Nokia in market share so HTC have actually be the BEST performing company in terms of phone market, Besting nokia in a fairly short space of time... they been around for a fair while (10 years or so i think) and since smart phones really took off(they were one of the first, especially with touchscreen tech ) then it seems their performance just went massively up hill.

Your link actually talks about market cap. Also, remember this story is about all phones sold, not just smartphones. HTC is a smartphone specialist.