Apple's latest-generation smartphone, the iPhone 6, has successfully delivered on its promise: it outsold Samsung in the fourth quarter of 2014, knocking the Android smartphone player off its perch as the top smartphone seller in the world.
In a year in which smartphone sales overall shot past the 1 billion point, with 1.2 billion smartphones sold in 2014 of the total 1.9 billion mobile phone sales, Apple's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus dominated and pushed Samsung off the leadership perch it has held for four years.
"Samsung continues to struggle to control its falling smartphone share, which was at its highest in the third quarter of 2013," wrote Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. "This downward trend shows that Samsung's share of profitable premium smartphone users has come under significant pressure."
The latest Gartner research figures reveal Apple sold 75 million devices in Q4 while Samsung sold 73 million. A year earlier, Samsung sold over 83 million smartphones while Apple sold about 50 million. The arrival of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sliced the 10 percent market share from the Android smartphone leader.
Coming in behind Samsung was Lenovo (24 million), Huawei (21 million) and Xiaomi (18.5 million). Even combined, all three players' sales don't reach Samsung or Apple's unit sales, yet the gains by the three handset makers can't be dismissed and illustrate how smartphone adoption, overall, is enjoying robust growth.
Chinese vendor Xiaomi, which just announced plans to open an e-commerce storefront in the U.S. to sell smartphone accessories (not handsets yet due to U.S. regulatory challenges and network compatibility issues), tripled its sales between the fourth quarter of 2013 and the fourth quarter of 2014.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry, whose Passport was well-received by reviewers in 2014, is still struggling to get back into a leadership spot. The enterprise smartphone player accounts for just 0.6 percent of all smartphone sales, selling 8 million handsets in the fourth quarter.
If Samsung wants to reclaim its title in the first quarter of 2015, it has to move fast and get focused on offering consumers some spanking new and creative apps, content and services, according to Gartner.
"With Apple dominating the premium phone market and the Chinese vendors increasingly offering quality hardware at lower prices, it is through a solid ecosystem of apps, content and services unique to Samsung devices that Samsung can secure more loyalty and longer-term differentiation at the high end of the market," wrote Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner.
