Gartner: Apple beats Samsung in Q4 smartphone sales

There's a new smartphone king.

Apple snatched the top spot during the fourth quarter, displacing rival Samsung Electronics, which held the crown since 2011, according to market researcher Gartner.

The launch of the ultra-popular iPhone 6 and 6 Plus propelled Apple to the No. 1 position for worldwide smartphone sales, commanding a 20.4% share of the market. Samsung finished second, with 19.9%, down nearly 10% from a year ago.

Samsung is being squeezed in the middle between Apple and Chinese vendors offering phones at lower prices.

"With Apple dominating the premium phone market and the Chinese vendors increasingly offering quality hardware at lower prices, it is through a solid ecosystem of apps, content and services unique to Samsung devices that Samsung can secure more loyalty and longer-term differentiation at the high end of the market," Gartner research director Roberta Cozza said in a statement Tuesday.

Samsung hopes to reignite interest in its smartphone business with the unveiling of the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge during this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Both devices are slated to launch this spring.

For Apple, it was the company's best quarter ever, selling 74.8 million smartphones worldwide. The shift to larger screens was met by big demand in the U.S. and China.

Apple shares are up slightly, to $129.18 per share.

Also making big gains: Chinese smartphone makers Huawei and Xiaomi. "They are producing higher-quality devices with appealing new hardware features that can rival the more-established players in the mobile phone market," Cozza said.

Xiaomi experienced the largest jump among global smartphone makers, more than tripling smartphone sales numbers compared with a year ago.

Overall, sales of smartphones worldwide topped 1.2 billion, up 28% from last year.

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