Apple still completely dominates the American smartphone market, according to the latest quarterly report from Counterpoint Research. Fruit company Cupertino had 53% of the pie in the third quarter of this year (July to September), while Samsung came a distant second with 23%.
In third place was Lenovo, owner of Motorola, let’s not forget – we assume that most if not all of the 14% share actually belonged to Motorola. The next brand, perhaps surprisingly, is HMD, but it only managed a 1% market share. ‘Others’ represent only 9%. We can’t think of a more polarized market than this, where one player has more than half the pie, and only two other brands actually matter.
As you can see in the image above, Apple’s market share has been stable over the past three quarters after peaking in the fourth quarter of last year, and in the second and third quarters of 2023 it was also around the same point as now. That’s an astonishingly consistent performance, we must say. On the other hand, Samsung fell from a peak of 31% in Q1 2024, and Lenovo/Motorola had its best quarter of the past six in Q3 2024.
The overall market fell 6% in the third quarter compared to the third quarter of 2023. So Apple’s actual shipments (not market share) fell 5% year over year. Samsung’s shipments fell 13% year over year, while Motorola rose 21% year over year, “primarily due to improved prepaid performance from the Moto G Play 2024“.