New Delhi: While global smartphone sales to end users were down 4.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2017, Samsung retained its top spot with 18.2 per cent share, Gartner said on Thursday.
The South Korean giant though saw a year-on-year unit decline of 3.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2017, but this did not prevent it from defending its top global smartphone vendor position against Apple.
“Despite the start of a slowdown in sales of Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S8+, the overall success of those models has helped Samsung improve overall average selling price,” Gartner said.
Samsung is set to announce the successors to its Galaxy series of smartphones at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona over the next weekend.
“The launches of its next flagship devices are likely to boost Samsung’s smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2018,” the report said.
Overall, the global smartphone sales hit nearly 408 million units in the fourth quarter — a 5.6 per cent decline over the fourth quarter of 2016.
This is the first year-on-year decline since Gartner started tracking the global smartphone market in 2004.
