#smartphone shipments

Even though worldwide smartphone shipments declined year over year in the fourth quarter of 2021, Samsung still reigns as the top smartphone brand in 2021 in terms of market share. Smartphone vendors shipped a total of 362.4 million phones during the fourth quarter of 2021, which was down 3.2% year over year but better than IDC’s forecast. On an annual basis though, the market grew 5.7% in 2021 with 1.35 billion smartphones shipped. "As we mentioned last quarter, the supply chain and component shortages started to have meaningful impact on the smartphone market as we entered the second half of the year, and this continues to be the case as we've now entered 2022. Despite a slight year-over-year decline in shipments, Apple, once again jumped above Samsung into the top spot in the fourth quarter, with the iPhone 13 taking a big portion of the volume in holiday quarter sales. Samsung and Xiaomi followed in the second and third spots respectively, but were also the only vendors out of the top 5 that grew shipments year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2021. For the full year, all five companies grew shipments year-over-year with four out of five achieving double-digit growth. Xiaomi had the highest annual growth reaching almost 30%, Samsung had the lowest, just 6.0% growth in 2021 but still, again, number one in smartphone shipment share. Read more in our articles including "IDC: Samsung top smartphone brand in 2021 market share" and "Round-up: Top 10 Flagship Smartphones".