Kantar Worldpanel: Apple Shoots Back To Top Of U.S. Smartphone Sales On An iPhone 5 Rocket, Android Leading Elsewhere
Samsung may be be the world's most popular smartphone brand, but in the influential U.S. market, Apple has climbed back to the top of the pack on the strength of its iPhone 5 sales.
Context & Ripple Effects
Kantar Worldpanel's latest sales read splits the smartphone world in two: Apple has retaken the top spot in U.S. smartphone sales on the back of the iPhone 5 launch, while Samsung remains the best-selling brand globally and Android continues to lead in markets outside the United States. The finding landed with unusually wide pickup — Reuters, CNET, Business Insider, MacRumors and others all carried it the same day — reflecting how much weight analysts and investors put on U.S. share as the premium-market bellwether.
First-order effects
- Apple enters the holiday quarter with renewed U.S. sales momentum behind the iPhone 5, restoring its domestic lead over Samsung at exactly the moment carrier shelf space and gift-season promotions are decided.
- Samsung's position becomes two-tracked: dominant worldwide, but beaten in the single most influential market — a gap its U.S. marketing and carrier push now has to close.
Second-order effects
- Android handset makers competing in the U.S. face pressure to counter the iPhone 5 cycle with aggressive holiday pricing and carrier bundles, since the data shows the platform's strength concentrated outside America.
- Panel-measurement firms like Kantar become strategic ammunition: each side of the Apple-versus-Samsung rivalry will shop whichever metric — U.S. sales share or global brand volume — flatters it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, U.S. smartphone share becomes a launch-cycle seesaw — flipping toward Apple with each iPhone refresh and reverting between cycles — while Android's volume advantage compounds everywhere else, entrenching a two-speed market.
- Market-share claims increasingly get litigated through competing research panels rather than settled by any single number, raising the value of methodology transparency for firms like Kantar Worldpanel.
The trend: Smartphone market share is becoming a per-launch-cycle contest in which Apple spikes in the U.S. around each iPhone release while Android consolidates volume across the rest of the world.