Samsung has been in the smartphone game for fifteen years. The company held the top spot in terms of smartphone shipments year after year for more than a decade and continues to outperform giants like Apple. New research shows that, over the past ten years, Samsung shipped almost three billion smartphones, which is a staggering figure, even more so when you compare the Korean tech giant's performance with its rivals.
According to IDC data compiled and presented by AltIndex, Samsung shipped 2.93 billion smartphones from the first quarter of 2014 to Q1 2024. The company is by far the most prolific smartphone maker, as Apple fell short by around 700 million shipments.
Apple, which is the 2nd largest smartphone maker by shipments over the last decade, recorded 2.2 billion iPhone shipments. But perhaps even more impressive than Samsung's 33% gap over Apple is that it shipped more smartphones over the last ten years than Xiaomi, Vivo, and Huawei combined.
Samsung beat Apple every year for the last decade
Even though Samsung's annual shipments have declined and its market share dropped by 10% in the last decade, it wasn't enough for Apple to outperform the Korean tech giant, despite a 2% increase in market share.
Samsung's worst year in the last decade was 2022, when it shipped 258.2 million smartphones worldwide. At that time, Apple recorded 225.3 million shipments.
Samsung's best year was 2015 — the year in which it announced the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note 5. In 2015, Samsung topped 320.9 million shipments, while its rival in Cupertino recorded a figure of 231.5 million.
In recent years, 2023 appears to have been great for Samsung, as the company managed to increase smartphone shipments to 286.6 million and outdo its performance from 2020 through 2022.
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The Korean smartphone maker appears to have now entered a new era of mobile, as its focus shifted toward optimization, build quality, and more recently, Galaxy AI.
The latter debuted with the Galaxy S24 flagship series which, by all accounts so far, appears to be a success for Samsung. The 2024 flagships set new early Q1 sales records in numerous markets. In Q1 2024, Samsung outperformed Apple by 10 million shipments and topped 60.1 million.
