Global smartphone revenue reached a historic high in the fourth quarter of 2017, having amounted to $120.2 billion, according to a new study conducted by Boston, Massachusetts-based market research firm Strategy Analytics. The figure represents an eight-percent annual increase, with the trend being largely backed by the fact that handsets became more expensive and not that people were buying more of them in the final quarter of the last year, as suggested by the analytics company and a number of previous studies. According to the newly reported data, the average selling price of smartphones amounted to $300 in the three-month period ending December 31, a significant increase compared to $255 recorded in Q4 2016.
Despite accounting for the vast majority of global shipments and sales, Android mobile devices accounted for less than half of the industry’s global revenue over the quarter, with Apple alone generating $61.4 billion, i.e. 51-percent of the total figure. Samsung took 15.7-percent of the market, according to the same metric, having made nearly $19 billion in smartphone revenue in Q4 2017. Huawei came in third with a revenue of $8.4 billion which represents seven-percent of the market. Apple is still regarded as by far the most profitable smartphone manufacturer in the world, whereas Huawei’s profit margin isn’t believed to be anywhere close to that of Samsung. All other original equipment manufacturers combined barely accounted for a quarter of the market, with their revenue hitting $31.5 billion over the last quarter, according to the same report. All figures reported by Strategy Analytics denote wholesale turnovers, with the firm making no estimates in regards to how much revenues retailers and wireless carriers managed to generate by selling the devices to consumers and businesses.
The average selling price of Samsung‘s devices in Q4 2017 amounted to $254, whereas that of Apple’s iPhones was close to $800 over the same period. Huawei was still offering by far the most affordable products of the big three, with its smartphones sold during the quarter having an average wholesale price of $205. While the volume of global handset shipments has largely been stagnating in recent times, the revenues generated by the industry are expected to continue rising in a steady manner in the immediate future.