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Apple wins three times more customers from Samsung than Samsung does from Apple

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New figures from CIRP reported in Fortune show that Apple wins three times as many smartphone customers from Samsung as Samsung does from Apple: 20 percent switched from a Samsung handset to an iPhone, while only 7 percent switched in the opposite direction.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest chunk of iPhone buyers – 42 percent – were upgrading from a previous iPhone, while the rest were split between those switching from other brands (around 30 percent) and those upgrading from a featurephone (26 percent) – with a handful of first-time cellphone buyers making up the rest.

With iPhone prices higher than the average for Samsung’s range of smartphones, it’s also no surprise to see that the educational attainments of iPhone owners tend to be higher, this being a rough proxy for income.

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Comments

  1. degraevesofie - 11 years ago

    The report also mentioned that iPhone buyers are younger than Samsung buyers (a bit of a surprise, given the education numbers). The education numbers for Apple seem more or less in line with the U.S. averages (though with a slightly larger fraction of graduate degrees), the Samsung numbers are noticeably below that. (This are U.S. numbers.)

    • Ben Lovejoy - 11 years ago

      The youngest market is one Samsung has been actively targeting with its Next Big Thing ad campaign, but so far it doesn’t seem to have paid-off.

  2. Laughing_Boy48 - 11 years ago

    Wall Street is only interested in whatever company can flood the market with as many smartphones as possible. It’s not interested in who’s switching from one maker to another. New customers are the only thing that matters. Feature phone users are all buying Samsung smartphones because those consumers are only interested in spending as little money as possible. Samsung has a huge edge selling cheap smartphones. There’s very little Apple can do about that. It’s important to me that Apple can hold customers it already has, but Wall Street is only interested in what new consumers are buying around the globe and Samsung owns that area of the smartphone market. Apple would have to throw away all of its quality standards to compete at the low-end and it’s not even worth the efforts. Why gaining market share at the expense of profit margins is so important to Wall Street, I’ll never quite understand. Platform popularity seems to carry a lot of weight. There must be the perception of security in numbers.

  3. Sander (@salamander11) - 11 years ago

    Let me fix this sentence: “20 percent *of the Apple buyers* switched from a Samsung handset to an iPhone, while only 7 percent *of the Samsung buyers* switched in the opposite direction.”

    If, say, three times more people buy Samsung phones than iPhones, then there are as much people switching from Apple to Samsung as vice versa. I don’t know the absolute numbers of Apple and Samsung buyers, but I remember that Samsung sells more phones than Apple, so the title of the post is wrong.

    • Ben Lovejoy - 11 years ago

      Your point is well made, but percentages are more relevant here than absolute numbers as only Samsung’s high-end handsets compete with the iPhone.

  4. Chris Banakis - 11 years ago

    Andoid is NOT exclusive to Samsung.

    All this proves is that Apple lost ~7% of their customers to Samsung.
    And that ANDROID lost ~20% of its users to Apple.
    (Assuming the results are accurate)

    I’m not saying one way or the other.

    Just saying that the theme of this article has NOTHING to do with the results it lists.

    • psimac - 11 years ago

      I agree. I don’t see where the chart specifically mentions Samsung. The red bar indicates Android.

  5. Steve Davis - 11 years ago

    The title is misleading and just simply wrong. I think they need to replace the first occurence of “Samsung” with “Android”. The survey doesn’t’ ask if people switched from Samsung specifically, just Android. I think this poll is a tad skewed since you’re not comparing OS’s, but rather phone brands. Now, let’s compare Android as a whole to iOS. It’s fine to compare the 2 phone brands, but the poll was addressing OS’s, not brands.

Author

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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