It seems that the trend this past Christmas It has been to give a Samsung smartphone and not an iPhone as the sales figures for the last quarter of the year showed us. During this last quarter, Apple broke the long streak of sales over Samsung during the holiday season.
If we look back, we see how the Korean manufacturer has always surpassed Apple in sales during the first three quarters of the year, however, Apple was beating Samsung when it came to the holiday shopping season, a period that coincidentally coincided with the availability in the market of new iPhone models.
However, both companies have experienced a general decline in sales in this last quarter compared to the previous year. During the fourth quarter of 2018, according to IDC, Apple shipped 68,4 million iPhones, 11,5% less than the same period last year. Samsung shipments were down 5,5% compared to the same period of the previous year, reaching a figure of 70,4 million units shipped.
In the fourth quarter of 2017, Apple shipped 77,3 million iPhones for the 74,5 million smartphones shipped by the Korean company Samsung. In 2016, Apple also exceeded the Korean company in the same period of the year. 2015 had been the last year that Samsung had managed to outperform Apple in sales for all four quarters of the year.
Despite the drop in sales, Apple has managed to maintain the second position in annual sales of devices, despite Huawei's increasingly strong push, a ranking that Samsung continues to lead for now. According to IDC, the year 2019 does not seem to be better than the previous one, but not only for Apple, but for all smartphone manufacturers in general.
