Samsung and Apple still lead global smartphone market, but smaller rivals are chipping away at their share

The titans of the smartphone space — Samsung and Apple — are still the titans, but smaller competitors like Huawei and Lenovo are chipping away at their market share. That's the latest from Strategy Analytics, whose numbers of the global smartphone marketshare for the first quarter of this year saw the combined smartphone marketshare of Samsung and Apple dip to 46.5% from 49.9%. That said, their total shipments were up massively from the year prior: 89 million from Samsung (up by 19.6 million units) and 43.7 million iPhones from Apple (up 6.3 million units). So neither company is in 'trouble' just yet, they're just claiming a smaller percentage of a much much larger pie.

How much larger is that pie? According to Strategy Analytics numbers, global smartphone shipments for Q1 2014 topped 285 million devices, an increase of 33% from the year prior. That's a huge movement.

So while everybody is up, it's the smaller players like Huawei and Lenovo that are gaining more ground. Both firms accounted for 4.7% of global sales this past quarter (that'd around 13.3 million sales each), and the mass of manufacturers under them — including LG, HTC, Motorola, BlackBerry, Nokia, Oppo, and Sony — accounted for the remaining 44.1%.

Source: Strategy Analytics