Riding on the iPhone 7’s success, Apple managed to topple Korean giant Samsung, to become the top player in the global smartphone market for the fourth quarter of 2016. Creating a new record, Apple shipped 78.3 million phones, while its Asian rival lagged behind by 300,000 devices and managed to sell 78 million phones. Apple posted an all-time record quarterly revenue of $78.4 billion!
“We’re thrilled to report that our holiday quarter results generated Apple’s highest quarterly revenue ever, and broke multiple records along the way. We sold more iPhones than ever before and set all-time revenue records for iPhone, Services, Mac and Apple Watch,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Revenue from Services grew strongly over last year, led by record customer activity on the App Store, and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline,” he added. He revealed nothing about the upcoming iPhone 8 though and said it was still in its early stages of development.
For the rest of 2016 though, it was Samsung which held the high post with a market share of 21 per cent. However, Its smartphone shipments declined 4 per cent year-on-year, registering 310 million units during the year. Interestingly, the US, China and India alone contributed to almost 50 per cent of the total smartphone shipments in 2016. Apple says it sees strong growth rates in countries like Brazil, India, Turkey, and Russia.