ZTE becomes 4th largest phone vendor

Was actually surprised to read the recent IDC report which puts
China’s ZTE (remember the ZTE-NBN deal?) as the world’s 4th largest
handset maker for 2010, even surpassing Apple which was bumped down to
5th.

Nokia still leads the pack with 30.8% share of total shipments for
the year ( with 123.7 million, though that’s still down by 2.4% from the
previous year). It’s then followed by Samsung at 20.1% (80.7 million
handsets) and LG Electronics at 7.6% (30.6 million).



ZTE came in at 4th with 16.8 million handsets (4.2% share) where it
pushed down Apple to 5th with 4.0% share (16.2 million). ZTE makes
handsets for 3rd parties like Verizon in the US.

Phone manufacturers shipped a total of 1.39 billion handset units in
2010, still up from the 1.17 billion units shipped in 2009 {source IDC}.