Samsung Electronics’ strategic smartphone in the first half of this year, the Galaxy S22 Ultra, was also behind Apple’s iPhone, two years after its release in the first quarter of this year. Although it still maintains the No. 1 position in the global market, the dominance of the high-end phone market has completely passed to Apple. There is also an analysis that the ‘game optimization service (GOS) controversy’ (controversy over game performance degradation) that arose earlier this year was hindered.
In the high-end phone market, it greatly lost to Apple’s iPhone, and Samsung took an emergency. Samsung’s strategy is to focus on foldable phones (folding phones) such as the Galaxy Z Fold and Flip 4, which are ahead of Apple, and to increase their share in the high-end phone market again.
According to Counterpoint Research, a global market research company on the 29th, Apple’s iPhone 13 basic model ranked first in sales in the global high-end smartphone market in the first quarter of this year.
A high-end phone refers to a product priced at about 510,000 won ($400) in Korean Won. The iPhone 13 basic model sales accounted for 23% of the high-end phone market in the first quarter of this year alone.
Apple’s iPhone 13 series ‘swept’ not only the first place, but also the second and third places. iPhone 13 Pro Max came in second with 13% of total sales, followed by iPhone 13 Pro (9%) in third place.
The iPhone 12 base model released in 2020 also recorded an 8% market share, ranking fourth.
On the other hand, Samsung Electronics ‘pulled up’ into the top 5 with only the Galaxy S22 Ultra 5G model released earlier this year, securing a 3% market share. In the first quarter of this year, it occupied 24% of the global smartphone market and greatly overtaken Apple (15%), but in the high-end phone market, it lags behind the iPhone 12 by 5 percentage points.
The industry believes that this result has nothing to do with the GOS controversy of the Galaxy S22 series. At the beginning of the launch, when the effect of launching a new product should be maximized, a fraudulent issue arose and the box office was damaged. Analysts say that ▷New product launches were delayed compared to last year ▷Samsung Electronics’ main smartphone markets such as Russia and Europe were engulfed in the aftermath of Corona 19 and the invasion of Ukraine, etc., which negatively affected sales volume.
