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Top 5 of world’s largest mobile phone manufacturers made public

07 February 2012 10:24 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Nijat Mustafayev â€“ APA-Economics. Apple has moved up two spots in the world phone manufacturer rankings, with LG and ZTE dropping down a rank and Nokia and Samsung taking the top two slots, according to new IDC research.

IDCâ€™s latest report on the state of the worldwide phone market says it grew by 6.1 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2011. But that growth is actually quite a bit weaker than the 9.3 percent year-over-year gain for Q3, indicating that feature phones are falling out of favor fast.

â€œThe mobile phone market exhibited unusually low growth last quarter, which shows it is not immune to weaker macroeconomic conditions worldwide,â€ said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC, in a statement. â€œThe introduction of high-growth products such as the iPhone 4S, which shipped in the fourth quarter, bolstered smartphone growth. Yet overall market growth fell to its lowest point since Q3 2009 when the global economic recession was in full bloom.â€

First place in total phone shipments is still Nokia, which has retained that position for some time by selling massive amounts of â€œdumbâ€ feature phones. Nokia recently introduced several new Windows Phone smartphones like the Lumia 900, showing off a new direction for the company, which hopes to become a major smartphone player again. Nokia shipped 113.5 million phones total.

Second place went to Samsung, which offers a blend of powerful Android phones and cheap feature phones. Samsung was notable for breaking the 90 million phone mark for the first time in a single quarter and breaking the 300 million mark for the first time in a single year for 2011. The company shipped 97.6 million phones in the fourth quarter.

Rounding out the top five are LG and ZTE in fourth and fifth place. LGâ€™s phone shipments dropped a staggering amount, going from shipping 30.6 million phones in Q4 2010 to shipping 17.7 million in Q4 2011, a 42 percent decline. Chinese manufacturer ZTE boosted shipments 8.9 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter with the shipping of 17.1 million phones.