Lenovo "Mobile Device Shipments" To Beat Samsung In 2015

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."

So they are, but they really aren't.