For the first time more than one billion smartphones have been shipped in a year. <br /><br />The statistics for 2013 come from research firm International Data Corporation which said the number of phones sent out to vendors was up 38.4 percent from 2012. <br /><br />Samsung remains number one. Its market share edged up to 31.3 percent from the previous year.<br /><br />Second-place Apple fell from 18.7 percent to 15.3 percent.<br /><br />China’s Huawei was third with 4.9 percent, followed closely by LG Electronics and Lenovo. <br /><br />Smartphones made up 55.1 percent of all mobile phone shipments last year. In 2012 they had been just over 40 percent. <br /><br />The one billion mark was reached thanks to strong demand in emerging countries like India and China where low-priced devices are coming within the means of more people. <br /><br />Research from another data compiler – Strategy Analytics – found that the second-tier smartphone brands – Huawei, LG and Lenovo – each grew their smartphone shipments around two times faster than the global industry average.<br /><br />That puts the pressure on the top two – Samsung and Apple – to hold off those and other hungry challengers this year.<br /><br />Strategy Analytics’s numbers differ slightly from International Data Corp’s. For all of 2013, it says global smartphone shipments grew 41 percent to reach a record 990 million.
