q4 2013

If you jump back to calendar Q3 2013, Apple was falling behind Samsung in US smartphone marketshare with just 34% of the market compared to Samsung’s 38%. The theory at the time was that US buyers were holding out for the new iPhones that launched in September. Fast forward to last quarter, the three month period ended December 31, and that theory appears to be holding up. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) just sent over its latest reports showing Apple has once again taken the lead thanks to a strong holiday quarter of iPhone sales. 
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IDC has announced preliminary PC shipment numbers for the fourth quarter of 2013, with Apple dropping from third to fourth place on the list. Apple shipped about 438,000 fewer machines than the same quarter in the previous year, allowing Lenovo to catch up and overtake them, despite Lenovo’s gain of only 163,000 shipped units.

HP, Dell, and Toshiba maintained the same positions as the previous year. While most companies lost a portion of their market share this year, Lenovo and Dell managed to claim most of the free space in the market. Overall the market saw a 1.6% drop over last year’s sales—about 285,000 shipments.

Gartner, on the other hand, reports that Apple actually gained quite a bit of market share. How these two numbers are so far apart is a mystery, but it’s possible that IDC included Surface-style tablets in its numbers, potentially skewing the results in comparison to Gartner’s numbers.
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Apple just wrapped up its Q4 earnings call where CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer went over some of the numbers discussed in its fourth quarter report, including record iPhone sales up 26% from last year to 33.8m units. Apple’s growth may not be as pronounced as in past quarters, but it appears that with its new iPhones and software it has been able to maintain what looks like more sustainable growth going into the holidays and next year.

Tim Cook hinted new product categories could be on the horizon, but even without a completely new product Apple was able to beat expectations by just about every metric. Here is a roundup of the notable numbers mentioned by Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer during Apple’s earnings call today that weren’t included in its fourth quarter results:

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