Now that the third quarter smartphone sales are released, this means that industry pundits can take a look at the regional sales to determine the market leaders. For Samsung, there is both good news and bad. The good news is that in five of six designated regions of the world, it is still the market leader. Samsung sold the most smartphones in Central and South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the Asia Pacific regions. The bad, predictably, is that it is not the market leader in the North American region, which is a repeat of the third quarter of 2014. Here, Samsung’s creditable market share of 26% trailed the market leader, Apple, by 7%. During the quarter, Samsung sold 10.5 million devices. The news that Samsung’s hero Galaxy S6 device family has not broken Apple’s stranglehold on the North American market is not a surprise for the industry or Samsung, who have been watching the sales figures of all devices over the time.
In the breakdown of the data, Strategy Analytics explained that Samsung saw a sales increase of three million units compared with the second quarter into the Middle East and Africa region, accounting for an impressive 52% market share. Unfortunately, Strategy Analytics did not provide a breakdown between the different Samsung models in the range but we are able to report on the number of devices sold, which amounts to 23.2 million in the Asia Pacific region, 16.1 million in the Middle East and Africa, 15.3 million in Western Europe, 11.8 million in Central and South America and 6.9 million in Eastern Europe. The Middle East and Africa region is now Samsung’s second largest market, having overtaken the Western European region compared with the same time last year.
As the largest manufacturer of Android devices, Samsung has the opportunity to use this sales volume to drive additional sales of products and services, such as Samsung Pay. However, in North America at least, the company faces an uphill battle with Samsung Pay as only a small number of flagship models support the technology and the application service appears to be suffering from some security incompatibility issues. Samsung Pay is also restricted by region as it is only currently available across a small number of countries, although we understand Samsung are working hard to roll the application out across more markets.