Samsung now owns almost 50 per cent of Android market

Now the world’s biggest handset manufacturer, Samsung owns just shy of 50 per cent of the Android kingdom, according to mobile ad platform Millennial Media.

Thanks largely to the successes of its Galaxy brand of smartphones, Samsung has consistently stolen market share from every other manufacturer inside the space between Q3 2011 and Q3 2012.

Samsung’s rise to supremacy has been fast and destructive. In Q3 2011 the company owned just 23 per cent of the market. During the same period HTC, then Android’s number one brand, controlled 32 per cent.

As of Q3 2012, HTC’s stake in the space shrank to just 16 per cent making the Taiwanese company the biggest victim of Samsung’s rise to power.

Samsung now has a 30 per cent lead on HTC.

Both Motorola and LG lost traction in the market as a result of Samsung’s continued growth too, with market shares slipping from 22 per cent to 16 per cent and 11 per cent to 9 per cent, respectively.

Samsung will update all of its major handsets in 2013, with the launch of its Galaxy S4 and Note 3 device said to be occurring at some point in Q2.

For this reason and more, we expect Samsung’s dominance to continue well into the new year and 2014.