A report published by Counterpoint Research shows that in 2025, Apple became an independent leader global smartphone sales with a 20 percent market share. This is thanks to, among others, warm welcome to the latest generation of iPhones (maybe apart from the iPhone Air, whose sales are failing) and the high popularity of the iPhone 16 in Asia, which resulted in a very solid, as much as 10%, increase in sales. In Cupertino, a few champagnes were certainly opened on this occasion, because The company last held the position of an independent leader in Counterpoint reports in 2011. Then, for years, it had to acknowledge the superiority of Samsung in order to make up for the losses in 2023-2024 and share the top place on the podium with the Koreans.
Apple is once again at the top of smartphone sales rankings thanks to the great popularity of the latest generations of iPhones.
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Counterpointresearch.com
Samsung also saw increases, but not as much
Taking second place Samsung also saw sales and market share increases – just not as big as Apple. The number of smartphones sold by Koreans increased by 5%. year to year, which resulted in an increase in shares by 1 percentage point. Interestingly, the report shows that the latest generations of Samsung's flagship Galaxy S smartphones sold better than the previous ones, which may be surprising considering that they were often criticized for having few changes compared to their predecessors.
Apple well prepared for the memory turbulence of 2026.
Last year's success of Apple was undoubtedly related to the fact that Apple successfully adapted its new iPhones to the needs of customers, serving them a number of significant changes (especially in the iPhone 17) when they were willing to replace the phone purchased during the pandemic. However, it is very there's a good chance that Apple won't be at the top of the smartphone world for just one yearbecause various reports show that it has prepared well for the very unpredictable year 2026.
This year in the IT world will be marked by problems with the availability and related rising prices of RAM and flash memory. Their prices have increased by several dozen percent, which translates directly into the production costs of smartphones and their final prices Analysts assume that this market will shrink in 2026. However, especially for smaller smartphone manufacturers, the bigger problem will not be that they will have to raise the prices of their products, which may discourage customers, but that they may not have enough components to have anything to sell at all, like in times of a pandemic.
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Consumer equipment currently has to compete for memory access with server room equipment, and usually loses this competition.
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Zoomik / Shutterstock
We know from media reports that Apple has been preparing for this situation for months. One of the key actions was to send managers to Korea for a series of face-to-face meetings with Samsung and SK Hynix, from which Apple reportedly returned on the back of a shield – that is, with long-term contracts guaranteeing the supply of appropriate amounts of memory at a relatively reasonable price. If Apple decides to accept lower margins on the sale of its hardware and does not raise its prices, then can easily take advantage of the entire situation to further increase its market share in smartphones and personal computers.
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Theoretically, Samsung, which has its own memory production factories, should also be in a good situation compared to its competitors. The catch is this Samsung's chipmaking divisions are very independent from its end-device divisions and the latter also have to buy memory from the former – not necessarily at preferential prices, as Samsung's marketing head, Wonjin Lee, clearly stated when warning against smartphone price increases. So if the Korean media reports are true, Samsung has become the largest supplier of RAM for new iPhonesa slightly paradoxical situation may arise that Apple will have better access to Samsung's memory than… Samsung. Although, in the end, the Koreans will certainly not lose financially from this.
