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Analysis: Only one-third of Samsung smartphone sales are of iPhone class

Daniel Eran Dilger at AppleInsider took a look at the numbers reported at Samsung Mobile's investor meeting today and reports that numbers show that the company sold fewer high-end smartphones than Apple this year.

News from the meeting wasn't too upbeat for Samsung Mobile. Dilger notes that the executives chose to focus attention on the company's future plans to accelerate acquisitions to move focus away from lagging sales of high-end smartphones. Since 2010, Samsung has made about 14 acquisitions. Apple has made about the same number of acquisitions in the past year, and Google has made about one acquisition a week since 2010.

Dilger quoted a Bloomberg report noting that Samsung "has used sales of cheaper handsets in emerging markets to stoke earnings in mobiles as growth in high-end devices slows amid market saturation." Samsung's latest quarterly earnings report shows that "high-end model shipments stayed at similar level QoQ" -- indicating stalled growth -- while Apple's iPhone sales were up 26 percent over the quarter a year ago.

That's not all of the bad news for Apple's primary competitor in the smartphone market: Dilger points out that all of those devices sold by Apple were high-end, while roughly one-third (126 million of total projected 2014 sales of 360 million devices) will actually be premium models like the Galaxy S and Note series.

Dilger ends his piece with the observation that "Apple also relies very upon iPhone sales, but it also has profitable Mac, iPad and iTunes, software and service related businesses, which generate 10 times the profit of Samsung's struggling Chromebook netbook, Android tablet, and Windows PC sales." For more details and graphs illustrating the situation that Apple's archrival is in, be sure to take a look at the AppleInsider piece.

Image: Samsung, via AppleInsider