Back in the day, Samsung was a capable smartphone maker, but it wasnt a star. It made a lot of feature phones, but pumped out smartphones like the mediocre Samsung Saga. Now, though, Samsung is a household name thanks to Google and its Android operating system. A recent tweet by Horace Deidu of Asymco points out how much Samsung has changed in just the past few years. According to Deidu, about 54 percent of Samsung’s phones are smartphones, which is up from 3 percent a mere two years ago.
Though Samsung doesn’t release its sales figures, recent IDC estimates suggest Samsung shipped over 50 million smartphones in Q2 2012 alone. This is an incredible 172.8 percent year-over-year increase and helped the company grab 32.6 percent of the smartphone market. Samsung attributed its growth to brisk sales of the Android-powered Galaxy Note and the Galaxy S III. Samsung easily surpassed Apple, which shipped 26 million iPhones. It also outshipped its other major competitors like Nokia (10.2M), HTC (8.8M) and ZTE (8.0M) combined.
The Korean company’s success has turned the mobile marketplace into a two-horse race with Apple and Samsung more than doubling their combined market share over the past two years. As shown above in another graph from Asymco that represents Comscore’s Q2 2012 numbers, iOS and Android, led by Apple and Samsung, are literally eating up the competition in the US.