Mobile Phone sales compared for 2015/6

In the last week or so we’ve seen a number of different companies release their 2015 sales figures.  Any guesses who was the highest selling manufacturer of 2015??  Read on and all shall be revealed…

Perhaps the biggest, or at least most cited, story last week was the release of figures for the iPhone.  Doom and gloom was certainly the flavour of the day, with shareholders warned amidst a year of relatively average sales figures.  Worse than that, future projections suggested this would only worsen.  Of course, we need to take the glossy headlines (‘Is the mighty iPhone in decline’) with a pinch of realism: iPhone sales in the last quarter of 2015 hadn’t really dropped, merely plateaued.  The big concern was China and many analysts seemed to think that Apple’s fortunes would lie on this, potentially volatile, market.  Statistics are often not the whole story, for while iPhone sales were levelling, Apple’s actual profits were higher than ever before.

Mobile Phone sales compared for 2015/6

Other manufacturers fared better, with Samsung remaining the highest seller, shipping in excess of 319 million devices in 2015 (compared to Apple’s 231 million).  These figures are interesting when compared to the paltry sales figures for Microsoft.  The depressing reading is that Microsoft sold somewhere in the region of 4.5 million devices in the most recent quarter (compared to approx 75 million iPhones), which accounts for about 1% of all phone sales.  Although the new Windows 10 Mobile handsets and software were only released at the end of last year, one still has to wonder how much longer Microsoft will persevere, especially when it looks at its market share and the way in which iOS and Android sales are staying strong.  Should Microsoft give up now?  What do our readers think?

Image source here.