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Daily Authority: 📈 Best sellers

US smartphone sales shows who's winning after LG's demise, plus more tech news you need to know today!
By
January 28, 2022
Samsung Galaxy A12 face up open to the app drawer

🚀 Good morning! Keep on rockin’ in the free world!

The smartphone game

Galaxy iPhone and Pixel smartphones with selection of chargers 2
  • Last night, Apple posted quarterly sales figures showing it sold $71.6 billion worth of iPhones in the three months to the end of December, which is pretty handy.
  • Not too shabby!
  • 90 days in a quarter, $71.6 billion …closing in a billion a day in iPhone sales.
  • Yeah, that’ll do nicely!

Counterpoint Research, by chance, posted its Q4 2021 US smartphone sales report today, finding exactly those happy times for Apple (sales up 17%), while Samsung, Motorola, OnePlus, and Google (sort of) all did well too.

  • Samsung’s Galaxy A12 was the best-selling Android phone of 2021, proving that price point matters and that enthusiasts who don’t want a Helio P35-powered phone don’t matter as much as the $180 price for one of the better sub-$200 phones.
  • Samsung sales grew 11% year-on-year, and that was without the Galaxy S21 Fan Edition which was super delayed. Counterpoint pointed to a mix of the A series phones and “strong performance of foldables” helping the growth, which was interesting to see: just how well did foldables do?
  • Elsewhere, the demise of LG propped up other winners, including Motorola and its best-ever sales figures.
  • Then there’s OnePlus. My colleague Hadlee posted that OnePlus stopped chasing enthusiasts, and it seems to be paying off. Although OnePlus commands just 2% of the market, sales were up 524% YoY, thanks to carrier deals for its Nord devices with T-Mobile.
  • Google showed growth: Counterpoint looks at 56% growth, with its own silicon powering the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro.
  • I’m somewhat unsure how good that is? Google is really trying with the Pixel 6 series, won accolades, and still is stuck at 1% of the smartphone market.

Roundup

boulder

There’s also the less famous, large boulder the size of a large boulder day coming up.

Rock steady! Cheers, Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.