Its products may not, as one British judge put it, be as “cool” as bitter rival Apple’s, but Samsung Electronics is speeding away from the iconic iPhone maker in the race for the global smartphone market.
The South Korean giant first took Apple’s smartphone top spot in the third quarter of last year, racking up a 20 per cent slice of worldwide sales, compared to Apple’s 14.5 per cent, according to telecom research firm IDC.
Jump ahead a year to the just-finished third quarter of this year and Samsung’s share has surged to 31.3 per cent, with Apple on 15 per cent.
Popular perceptions of the two companies – currently locked in a series of patent infringement lawsuits in 10 countries – could hardly be more different.
Apple is seen as the supreme innovator, single-handedly creating or re-inventing entire markets with a small number of imaginative, stylish products that inspire quasi-religious devotion among those who can afford them.
Samsung, by contrast, is the corporate behemoth that picks up ideas, refines them with extraordinary efficiency and packages them in a wide product range that covers both low- and high-end users.