Apple's reign over the smartphone market expanded to India last week as its higher-priced iPhone 5s sold out in less than 24 hours of release and iPhone 5c became the fastest-moving model in stores.
Though the Cupertino, Calif. company had released the smartphone way back in September 20 in the U.S., even today, huge lines of people can be seen outside several Apple stores as eager fans wait to get their hands on the flagship smartphone.
During the iPhone 5s and 5c's first week of release, Apple sold a combined 9 million of both devices. According to the company's fourth-quarter earnings release, Apple sold 33.6 million of the smartphones by September-end.
Apple is far from slowing down even as rival Google gains ground. And, if new research is any indication, the search engine giant better watch out.
Chicago-based Consumer Intelligence Research Partners released research based on interviews of 400 new iPhone 5s and 5c buyers. The research indicated that more iPhone buyers are switching from Android this year compared to last year.
Twenty percent of new iPhone 5s and 5c purchasers said they were moving from Android as opposed to the 16 percent who made the switch last year. Smartphones of Apple's biggest hardware rival Samsung, feature Google's operating system. According to the research, Apple was seeing a greater percentage of converts from Samsung - 20 percent, than those switching from Apple to Samsung, which come in at 7 percent. That means one fifth of Apple's new customers previously owned a Samsung device.
Part of the reason could be Apple's trend of focusing on the higher end marked as opposed to Samsung's more "mass market" variety of both premium and economically friendly device models.
Decreasing are the number of iPhone buyers moving from basic feature phones, BlackBerry, or other smartphone platform according to CIRP's Mike Levin in a press release. "Perhaps because the declining base of non-smartphone owners, a smaller percentage of iPhone buyers upgraded from a basic or flip phone, compared to the year-ago launch," he added.
