Is Apple Doomed? Latest Data Doesn't Look Good

According to the latest data from the IDC, Samsung's share of smartphone shipments worldwide grew 60% over the past year, while Apple's shipments only grew 6.6%.
In fact almost all Korean and Chinese manufacturers had a better year than Apple.



Samsung was the undisputed winner, with a total of 32.7% of all shipments, nearly double that of Apple. LG, Huawei and ZTE, didn't do too badly either, shipping between 9 and 10 million handsets.

Surprisingly, LG also did very well. The company managed to double their handset shipments year-over-year. Huawei nearly doubled their shipments as well.

It could be that tepid sales of the iPhone 5 in Asia resulted in slowed growth for Apple. The newest iPhone is not exactly selling like hotcakes in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, where the Galaxy S3 has become even more popular. It looks like growth has all but halted for Cupertino.

But smartphones remain a big business, generally. For the first time ever, they've even outshipped feature phones. Smartphones garnered 51.6% of 420 million handsets shipped over the past year, edging out sales of feature phones.

Apple better try hard if they want to catch up to their competitors.

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