Samsung, the Korean-based smartphone manufacturing giant, topped the sales chart of 2015, amidst all controversies that the company faced at the beginning of 2016.
Samsung finished the year with a total of 324.8 million shipments, which is 2.1 percent higher than its previous year's record. The company was under continuous pressure throughout the year because of Apple and because of the emerging Chinese players. Even though Samsung was under pressure, the Korean-based company managed to fare really well in this multi-front battle.
Apple also hit a new height and scored the second place, ending 2015 with 231.5 million units shipped; however, compared to the 192.7 million shipments in 2014, the company attained excessive growth of about 20.2 percent by the end of 2015.
Apple was followed by Huawei, which bragged the highest on the yearly growth rate. In addition to their increased shipments of about 37 percent in a single year, Huawei also turned out to be the 4th in the history of mobile phone vendors shipping over 100 million smartphones in a single year. The next two places were taken by Lenovo and Xiaomi, respectively.
Meanwhile, International Data Corporation's preliminary analysis of Worldwide Yearly Mobile Phone Tracker suggests that smartphone vendors across the globe shipped a total of 399.5 million units during the fourth quarter of 2015, in which, resulted in an increase of growth rate compared to the previous year. The 5.7 percent growth rate was observed in comparison to the 377.8 million units that were shipped during the last months of 2014.
In addition, during 2014, only 1301.7 million units were shipped worldwide, while the entire year of 2015, a total of 1432.9 million units of smartphones was shipped worldwide. This also marked the highest shipments ever made in smartphone manufacturing industry.
A senior research manager of IDC's mobile phone team Melissa Chau quoted as saying that "while the Chinese players are clearly making gains this quarter, every quarter sees new brands joining the market."
See the hilarious video comparing Apple and Samsung stores: