Smartphones overtake cell phones for the first time

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Samsung is doing particularly well; Nokia is doing particularly poorly.

Pick a smartphone, any smartphone. It's what most of the world is doing!

While the PC market is slowing down, the smartphone market continues to grow. In fact, market research firm IDC is reporting that worldwide shipments of smartphones outstripped shipments of feature phones for the first time this quarter. There were 418.6 million phones shipped in total, of which 216.2 million were smartphones. Overall, the phone market is up 16.2 million units compared to the first quarter of 2012.

Samsung remains the undisputed leader in this market: it shipped 115 million phones (both smart- and feature-) in the first quarter of this year, compared to 93.6 million handsets last year. Other companies that showed growth include Apple (from 35.1 million units to 37.4 million) and LG (from 13.7 million units to 15.4 million), though IDC notes that "the last time the iPhone maker posted a single-digit year-over-year growth rate was 3Q09."

The world's other phone makers, all lumped together into the "others" category, shipped 175.4 million phones in the first quarter of 2013, compared to 161.1 last year; this doesn't tell us much about how individual companies like HTC are doing.

This shift has been the most damaging to Nokia, whose smartphone business hasn't grown quite quickly enough to make up for the feature phone sales it has lost. It shipped about 21 million fewer phones in Q1 of 2013 than in 2012, a drop of over 25 percent. It's still the second largest phone vendor overall (third place goes to Apple and its 37.4 million units), but it appears to be falling rapidly. The only other company listed that lost share was ZTE, whose shipments were down to 13.5 million phones from 16.2 million last year.

As always, these IDC numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, since they're based on IDC's own calculations and only take into consideration units shipped and not units sold. Even if they're only broadly accurate, though, they show that companies' efforts to cater to "emerging markets" is paying off, and we expect smartphone shipments will only continue to outpace those of dumbphones as these efforts intensify.

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