Samsung is again undisputed leader of smartphone sales

Global smartphone sales were up 14.4% in 2015, with a record number of 1.4 billion handsets sold, according to new figures from Gartner. Plus, more than one in five of the smartphones sold in 2015 were Samsung models.

Samsung once again ended the year as the undisputed leader of global smartphone sales, shifting no less than 320,219 million handsets worldwide. The firm's total sales were up on 2014, despite a slight drop in market share from 24.7% to 22.5%.

In second place, Apple sold a record number of iPhone handsets in 2015, with 225,850 million smartphones sold and a market share of 15.9%. Next come Huawei (104 million, 7.3%), Lenovo/Motorola (72.7 million, 5.1%) and Xiaomi (65.6 million, 4.6%). Over 400 million smartphones sold in just three months. Over 403 million smartphones were snapped up worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2015 alone, up 9.7% on Q4 2014. Samsung remained top of the table, selling the most smartphones globally between October and December 2015, with 83.4 million handset sales (for a market share of 20.7%), compared with 71.5 million for Apple (17.7%).