TOKYO – The Android platform has locked down 74% of the smartphone market, according to first quarter 2013 figures for mobile handset sales from Gartner, ZD Net reports. Samsung stayed on top in smartphone brand sales globally. 

Gartner found that shipments of mobile phones across the world nearly advanced to 426 million units during this year’s first quarter, a slight bump year-over-year. Worldwide sales of smartphones reached 210 million, a 42.9% increase compared to first quarter 2012. Smartphone sales grabbed close to 50% of mobile phone sales across the world during the first quarter, a 34.8% rise year-over-year.

But sales of feature phones dropped 21.8% in the first quarter 2013. Only Asia/Pacific saw mobile phone sales rise, up 6.4% year-over-year.

“More than 226 million mobile phones were sold to end users in Asia/Pacific in the first quarter of 2013, which helped the region increase its share of global mobile phones to 53.1% year-on-year,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “In addition, China saw its mobile phone sales increase 7.5% in the first quarter of 2013, and its sales represented 25.7% of global mobile phone sales, up nearly 2 percentage points year-on-year.”

Sales of Samsung smartphones jumped 13% during the first quarter, pushing the company’s market share of the devices to just over 30%. The closest competitor, Apple, has only an 18.2% global market share. Apple’s share fell 4.3%.

“There are two clear leaders in the OS market and Android's dominance in the OS market is unshakable,” said Gupta. “With new OSs coming to market such as Tizen, Firefox and Jolla we expect some market share to be eroded, but not enough to question Android's volume leadership.”