Global phone sales hit 418M as Samsung sells more than Nokia + Apple + LG combined

Samsung sold 120 million mobile phones last quarter — more than 29 percent of the total global market and more than competitors Apple, Nokia, and LG combined — as global phone shipments reached a record 418 million.

But there was some good news for former global best seller Nokia.

“Samsung grew 17 percent annually and shipped a record 120.1 million mobile phones worldwide, capturing a record 29 percent market share in Q3 2013,” Strategy Analytics executive director Neil Mawston said in a statement. “Nokia shipped a slightly better-than-expected 64.6 million mobile phones worldwide in Q3 2013. Nokia’s 15 percent global mobile-phone market share is showing signs of stabilizing sequentially as demand for the Microsoft Lumia smartphone range is improving.”

Of course, feature phones, which are a diminishing segment as 60 percent of phones sold this past quarter were smartphones, remain a problem. Global volumes for Nokia alone dipped 27 percent year-over-year.

Apple shipped a record 33.8 million iPhones this past quarter. That’s faster than the industry at large, so Apple actually grew global market share from 7 percent to 8 percent, but that’s much slower than Samsung, which grew 55 percent year-over year.

There’s good news in store next quarter, however.

“We expect Apple to gain further mobile-phone share in the upcoming fourth quarter of 2013 due to high demand for its new iPhone 5s model,” senior analyst Ken Hyers said.

Other standouts include Chinese manufacturer Huawei, which shipped 14.6 million phones in the quarter for 3 percent global market share, and LG, which grew from 14.4 million units to 18.3 million phones year-over-year.