Has Samsung really overtaken Apple in the smartphone market?

There’s been a great deal written over the last few days about Samsung apparently overtaking Apple to become the world’s biggest smartphone handset manufacturer by sales volume. But is it really true?

It would help to answer that question if we could compare oranges with oranges, but we can’t. While Apple’s results for July – September tell us that it sold 17m iPhones in the quarter, Samsung’s figures for the period report only that it shipped 28m smartphone handsets to distributors and resellers. We don’t know how many of those resulted in sales to customers during that period.

It may be that Samsung’s shipments and sales are the same, but it’s unlikely. Samsung has already been accused this year of ‘channel stuffing’ – the practice of shipping more units than retailers can sell, in order to boost shipment figures. In January this year, it said it had sold two million Galaxy Tabs. When pressed during an earnings call, the company admitted that the 2m figure didn’t relate to sales at all, but to shipments into the channel. Real sales were much less.

Apple reported in its earnings call that at the end of the July – September quarter, it had 5.75 million iPhones in channel inventory. Add that to the 17m iPhones it sold and Samsung’s lead is cut in half.

We have no way of knowing how many of the 28m handsets Samsung shipped into the channel were actually sold, because Samsung doesn’t report sales figures. And while it would have to be channel stuffing on a grand scale to have sold fewer than 17m, reporting that Samsung has overtaken Apple in handset sales, as if it were cut and dried and permanent, is well wide of the mark.

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