There's a report out today that suggests Lenovo is about to overtake
Samsung in mobile device shipments, and that they'll do so inside of the
year 2015. This report comes from Digitimes,
citing their own "Digitimes Research", and suggests that "Lenovo is
estimated to beat Samsung Electronics in mobile computing device
shipments... by about one million units in 2014 and become the
second-largest mobile computing device brand vendor worldwide, only
behind Apple."
The only problem with calling this race is in the term
"mobile device" - mostly because to them, this only means notebooks and
tablets, not smartphones. Wait a second here, you might say, when did notebooks become "mobile
devices"? Digitimes Research considers notebooks mobile devices - and we
probably should at this point, too. You CAN carry them around after
all.
The problem with a report like this is that it makes it seem like Lenovo's smartphone business is going to overtake Samsung. That's not even close to being correct.
Have a peek at ICD's October report
of smartphone shipments for the third quarter of 2014 and you'll see
that Samsung annihilates the competition with 78.1 million smartphones
shipped in one quarter. This compares to Lenovo's 16.9 million that same
quarter.Digitimes Research suggests Lenovo's overall tablet shipments to "grow slightly" to 11.7 million units in 2015 while Samsung's tablet shipments fall to 36 million units. Lenovo is said to likely ship 38 million notebooks in 2015 while Samsung only hits 5 million. So Digitimes suggests that because Lenovo might ship 49.7 million "mobile devices" (notebooks and tablets) while Samsung ships 41 million "mobile devices" (notebooks and tablets) in 2015, that Lenovo is estimated to "beat Samsung Electronics in mobile computing device shipments."
