Apple's iPhone led 2013 US consumer smartphone sales with 45% share - NPD
With more than 120 million smartphones sold in the U.S. in 2013, Apple's iPhone accounted for nearly half of those, taking a 45 percent share in its home market last year, new data released by the NPD Group on Thursday reveals.
Context & Ripple Effects
The full-year number confirms the quarterly picture NPD published in January, when Apple took 42% of US smartphone share in Q4 2013 against Samsung's 26% while HTC, Motorola, and BlackBerry shrank. What the annual view adds is scale: more than 120 million smartphones sold to US consumers in 2013, with the iPhone accounting for roughly 45% of them.
It also caps an arc that runs back years in this corpus — from the iPhone becoming the leading US smart phone model as early as July 2007, through NPD's 2012 finding that Android was winning more first-time smartphone buyers even as Apple led handsets overall, to the recurring asymmetry that a minority unit share still captured over half the industry's profit. Eight outlets including Fortune and Investor's Business Daily picked up the NPD release, unusual breadth for a market-share datapoint and a sign of how much weight analysts put on Apple's home-market position.
First-order effects
- Apple enters 2014 holding near-majority share of its home market by NPD's count, while Samsung sits far behind at 26% on the quarterly measure and HTC, Motorola, and BlackBerry are already contracting.
- US carriers' smartphone lineups are effectively a two-brand pitch for upgrades: the NPD data covers consumer sales, where repeat iPhone buyers — not the first-timers Android drew in 2012 — drive the 45%.
Second-order effects
- Android vendors outside Samsung face a squeezed middle: they cannot match Apple's upgrade loyalty in the US and are pushed toward the first-time-buyer and budget tiers that NPD previously identified as Android's acquisition engine.
- With Samsung the only other vendor above a quarter of quarterly sales, supplier and component leverage in the US concentrates around two customers, raising the cost of losing either as a design win.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the US market structurally becomes an ecosystem duopoly — iOS versus Android-as-Samsung-plus-a-long-tail — rather than a five-way hardware race, echoing the share-versus-profit split documented since 2011.
- A market where one vendor approaches half of unit sales invites renewed antitrust and carrier-negotiation scrutiny of Apple's terms, the kind of concentration regulators historically examine once share passes the 40% mark.
The trend: The US smartphone market is consolidating into a two-ecosystem structure in which Apple converts minority global unit share into dominant home-market sales and a disproportionate slice of industry profit.