Samsung Now World Leader in Cell Phone Manufacturing, ahead of Nokia

After 14 years of Nokia holding the top spot in the cell phone food chain, there is now a new number one in the world of cell phone manufacturing. That new number one, according to a recent Gartner study, is Samsung, which surpassed Nokia in an environment that's been oddly on the decline in recent days.

The Gartner study showed that not only had Samsung moved ahead of Nokia to become the world's largest cell phone maker, but that, following ten consecutive quarters of growth, global sales had fallen fully two percent in the January to March corridor.

The biggest driver of the reduction in growth was the massive Chinese market, which decided almost collectively to adopt a wait-and-see attitude about upcoming new models and saw just over six percent of its market fall off in advance of new models set to hit in this quarter or in the next. Economic uncertainty, however, played a role in the cuts as well, especially across Western Europe, which has been facing a panoply of economic crises, and North America, still attempting to shake off a housing market crisis from 2008.

Nokia not only lost its crown as the largest smartphone maker to Samsung, but also saw its market share damaged the most by the reduced demand. A year ago, Nokia devices accounted for 25.1 percent of the market. By comparison, a year later, their share of the market was 19.8 percent. Its share of the smartphone market was even worse off, as it fell to just nine percent.

Samsung, as a result, picked up much of Nokia's losses, rising to 20.7 percent of the global market, while comparative newcomer Apple, the third largest smartphone maker on the sheer strength of its lone brand, the iPhone, saw its share double in one year to 7.9 percent of the market.

Gartner, in response to this, issued a cautious outlook for the rest of 2012, saying that the full-year market growth outlook figure would be lowered fully one percent in response, representing 20 million handsets total.

Given Nokia's recent involvement with Windows Phone, as well as the unexpected popularity of devices like the PureView 808 and the Lumia 900 line -- which even Siri recently declared better than the iPhone 4S before Apple got a chance to issue an update to Siri -- it's clear that Nokia doesn't mean to take its losses sitting down. Given the current state of the global economy, however, it's not immediately clear just how much Nokia will be able to recover in the first place, especially with Samsung's imminent release of the Galaxy S III, their new flagship phone, and a new iPhone in the wings for likely later this year. Still though, more competition usually means better experiences for customers, so seeing how this all boils down should be worth watching.