Counterpoint has published the list of the best-selling smartphones of 2022, and we have received a major surprise to see that Apple led the market in an overwhelming way. I’m not exaggerating, the iPhone occupied eight of the ten positions of best-selling terminals in that year, and only lost two positions to Samsung, who achieved significant success with the Galaxy A13, a cheap smartphone that, in its base configuration, has an average price of 149 euros.
Take a look at the attached graph. On the left side we have the ten best-selling smartphones of 2022, and on the right the position they occupied in each month of that year. So, the iPhone 13, which was the best-selling smartphone of 2022, remained the leader between January and August, dropped to second position in September, and was in fourth place between October and December, both included. The iPhone 13 Pro Max held the second position from January to August, and in September and October it fell to seventh place, closing November and December in the 11th and 15th places of the best-selling smartphones.
If you wonder what happened in September to cause this change in the position of the two best-selling smartphones, the answer is very simple, that Apple launched the new iPhone 14, and these cannibalized the sales of the iPhone 13. In In this sense, we have a very curious fact, and that is that the iPhone 14 Pro Max was such a huge success that despite having arrived in September managed to position itself as the third best-selling smartphone of 2022.
The iPhone 14 Pro also had a better reception than the iPhone 13 Pro, although it was below the iPhone 14 and did not surpass the iPhone 13 Pro either. Curiously, the iPhone SE 2022, a terminal that some have been calling a failure and selling little, ranked ninth as the best-selling smartphone, and in August it came to position itself as the fifth best-selling smartphone. Keep in mind that all these data refer to sales globally.
Looking at Samsung, we can see that the Galaxy A13 was very successful between January and September, but that as of October suffered a significant drop in sales. The opposite happened to the Galaxy A03, it started off weak in March and took off in the following months until it peaked in August, when it became the fourth best-selling smartphone. From there it again suffered a downward trend.
According to Counterpoint, the big names in the smartphone sector will take advantage of this year to clean stock and to better refine its product catalog, a movement, the latter, which will not only seek to optimize costs but will also have as its main objective minimize cannibalization between models that are too similar, or that offer too different values and have very similar prices. That the Galaxy S22 does not appear on this list says a lot about the loss of interest that Samsung’s top of the range has been suffering.
