Apple Becomes World's Largest Smartphone Maker: Samsung is New #2

Earlier this morning, Samsung revealed results for the second quarter of 2011, not giving the exact number of sold smartphones. Unfortunately as they often do, they did not give us the smartphone unit sales number in their financial results - And two of the big four analyst houses have called the Samsung 2Q 2011 number at 19.0 million.

We knew already that Apple had toppled Nokia who was last quarter still the biggest smartphone maker. But we didn't know until now, if Apple also got the crown. They did.

Congratulations Apple! In four short years you took the global smartphone market, what can be said to be the hottest and most-contested industry right now - and you won! Wow. Number 1. Congratulations!

Congratulations also to Samsung for passing Nokia, very strong growth continues. And sad to see the 15 year reign by Nokia come to an end, but you would have expected Nokia to put up more of a fight, to drop from 1st to 3rd in only one quarter, that is bad news for Nokia (not entirely unexpected given the current management, ed.).

I have only 2 of the big 4 analyst houses having given their total smartphone industry numbers, so I can't give a certain market share count yet, but we can do the rankings for the top 8. They are as follows for second quarter of 2011 (and ranking in previous quarter i.e. 1Q 2011):

1. Apple . . . . . . . . . 20.3 M . . . (2)
2. Samsung . . . . . . 19.0 M . . . (4)
3. Nokia . . . . . . . . . 16.7 M . . . (1)
4. RIM . . . . . . . . . . 13.3 M . . . (3)
5. HTC . . . . . . . . . . 11.0 M . . . (5)
6. LG . . . . . . . . . . .   5.4 M . . . (7)
7. Sony Ericsson . . .   5.3 M . . . (6)
8. Motorola . . . . . . .  4.4 M . . . (8)

I will be coming with more analysis and hope to find a number for Android/bada/Windows split for Samsung from somewhere. Stay tuned and we'll do our best to get the proper breakdown.