A new report from Newzoo hails Samsung as 2016’s leading OEM and maker of smartphones, pulling ahead of Apple by a noticeable margin although not so much that it caused Apple’s own market share to dwindle. According to the report Samsung ended 2016 with 31 percent market share for smartphones on a global scale pushing past Apple’s 25.4 percent. These numbers are based on monthly active devices which means that the 31 percent is a representation of the amount of consumers based on how many are actively using their device each month for last year, not a representation of the market share for how many devices were sold. That being said this is still an impressive accomplishment, albeit perhaps unsurprising given Samsung’s popularity with devices like the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge that launched earlier in 2016.
While Samsung easily takes the top spot for monthly active devices for 2016 thus solidifying them as 2016’s most popular smartphone brand, the same sort of success didn’t befall other top brands, even Huawei who is listed as the number three brand for last year having only 7.4 percent of smartphone monthly active device numbers. Huawei is followed by Xiaomi at 6.3 percent, then Oppo and Vivo at 5.5 percent and 4 percent respectively. LG, Sony, Motorola, and Lenovo make up the 7, 8, 9, and 10 spots with 3.4 percent, 2.8 percent, 2.7 percent, and 1.8 percent.
Last year Newzoo reports that there were 2.3 billion active smartphone users across the entire globe. That number jumps up to 2.6 billion this year, and according to Newzoo’s data that number is expected to grow by another billion by the time 2020 hits, totaling out at 3.6 billion active smartphone users globally. That’s a huge increase over the next few years and a huge portion of consumers that Samsung and other brands have yet to tap. Additionally, those active smartphone users are a treasure trove of revenue for mobile app and game developers with global app revenue in 2017 so far recorded at $56.4 billion, $46.1 billion of which is revenue related to mobile games which is a staggering 82 percent of that total revenue number. App and game revenue is expected to grow to $85 billion in 2020 with games making up $65 billion of that number, though actual app revenue will have taken some of that percentage away from game-related revenue as it’s expected to increase to a total of 24 percent or $20 billion. While there are no numbers correlating the amount of Samsung’s monthly active device users to the growth of app revenues, it’s pretty likely that with as large of a percentage of smartphone users as they had last year and this year so far, that those device users contributed a hefty amount to the overall revenue made from apps and games.
