Smartphone Market Share

Apple has been seeing its smartphone market share erode over the last several years as its simple-and-small line up of iPhones competed against model after model of low-priced, big-screened, fancy-featured Android-based handsets. But it looks like its latest iPhone 6 models — with their larger faces, 4G compatibility and Apple Pay support — may be helping it turn the tide a bit.

The latest figures from Kantar Worldpanel, the WPP-owned market research firm, found that in the last three months up to October 31, Apple’s share of smartphone sales grew in nearly every market, against lower or even declining sales of Android handsets — which, to be perfectly clear, are still leading the market overall by some margin.

Within Android, it’s a mixed bag of who is in the lead, depending on which country you are looking at. In China, Xiaomi is the market leader overall (more on this below), but in most markets Samsung remains on top, with other players “getting share from each other more than share from Samsung,” Kantar’s chief researcher and U.S. head Carolina Milanesi tells me. The exception is the U.S., where LG is starting to woo some consumers away from its Korean rival.

Breaking out regional performance, in Europe’s “big five” markets of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, Android accounted for nearly 70% of all sales, although that was a decline of some 2.6 percentage points over a year ago. Apple, meanwhile, was up by nearly 6 percentage points to 20.7% of all sales. In Great Britain specifically, Apple is now at 40% of all smartphone sales, its highest ever level, after rising 10.4 percentage points over last year.