Global sales of smartphones accounted for 55% of all mobile phones sold during the third quarter, a Gartner report found.
The analyst firm’s report revealed that worldwide mobile phone sales reached 455.6 million units during the quarter, up 5.7% over the corresponding period in 2012.
Global smarthone sales rose 45.8% to 250.2 million units, and the Asia/Pacific witnessed the highest sales in both segments with smartphones sales rising by 77.3% and the mobile phone segment reporting growth of 11.9%.
However, western Europe, which reported positive results for the first time in 2013, and the Americas both reported a rise in their overall mobile phone markets.
Gartner principal research analyst Anshul Gupta said that sales of feature phones continued to decline and that the decrease was more pronounced in markets where the average selling price (ASP) for feature phones was much closer to the ASP of affordable smartphones.
"In markets such as China and Latin America, demand for feature phones fell significantly as users rushed to replace their old models with smartphones," Gupta said.
Analysts also projected that the global mobile phone sales are set to reach 1.81 billion units by the end of 2013, up 3.4% from last year.
"We will see several new tablets enter the market for the holiday season, and we expect consumers in mature markets will favour the purchase of smaller-sized tablets over the replacement of their older smartphones," Gupta added.
Samsung topped the list of vendors with a 32.1% market share, followed by Apple (12.1%), Lenovo (5.1%), LG (4.8%), Huawei (4.7%) and others (41.1%).
In the global smartphone OS market, Android captured 81% of the market share during the quarter, followed by iOS, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Bada, Symbian and others.
"However, the winner of this quarter is Microsoft, which grew 123%. Microsoft announced the intent to acquire Nokia’s devices and services business, which we believe will unify effort and help drive appeal of Windows ecosystem," Gupta said.
"41% of all Android sales were in mainland China, compared to 34% a year ago. Samsung is the only non-Chinese vendor in the top 10 Android players ranking in China.
"Whitebox Yulong is the third-largest Android vendor in China with a 9.7% market share in the third quarter.
"Xiaomi represented 4.3% of Android sales in the third quarter up from 1.4% a year ago."
In terms of OS, Samsung sold highest devices, followed by Nokia, Apple, ZTE and Huawei.
"While Samsung has started to address its user experience, better design is another area where Samsung needs to focus," Gupta added.
"Samsung’s recent joint venture with carbon fibre company SGL Group could bring improvements in this area in future products."
