Even though we’re approaching the end of the year’s first quarter, it appears market research firms are not done releasing interesting reports about the evolution of global smartphone sales in 2019 just yet. While Counterpoint Research, Canalys, and the IDC all came out with their Q4 and full-year estimates more than a month ago, Gartner waited until today to crunch its own numbers… and name a different vendor winner for the final three months of 2019.

Did Samsung steal Apple’s Q4 2019 crown after all?

But Gartner claims Samsung was the world’s number one vendor during the 2019 holiday season, as well as the entire year, with 70.4 million and 296.2 million unit sales respectively. Obviously, no one is disputing the chaebol’s overall supremacy last year, when Gartner estimates only a little more than 193 million iPhones were sold, far behind Huawei’s 240 million+ tally, not to mention Samsung’s towering figures.

As far as Q4 is concerned, the stark contrast between these numbers put together by Gartner and, say, the 78.4 million iPhone shipments estimated by Canalys might be explained by a difference in research methodology. Gartner seems to be tracking “sales to end users”, which is not the same thing as shipments. The latter measurement often includes devices shipped by a manufacturer to a retailer before actually ending up in the hands of consumers.

The only logical conclusion we can draw here is that Apple overestimated iPhone demand around the holidays, which helped the company take the global shipment trophy while losing the sales game to its arch-rival. Still, the Cupertino-based tech giant can arguably be happy with its Q4 2019 sales performance, which marked a solid improvement from the same period of the previous year.

Samsung thrived in Europe at Huawei’s expense

Counterpoint Research claims that resulted in a 2 percent year-on-year market share surge for Samsung, from 25 to 27 percentage points. Unfortunately, the full report doesn’t appear to be out just yet, so we don’t know exactly how big were Huawei and Apple’s slices of the European pie in the October – December 2019 timeframe.

What we do know is that Samsung struggled across regions like Middle East-Africa, Central and South America, and even North America, so Europe crucially helped the company keep its global numbers relatively steady amid mounting pressure from brands like Oppo and Realme in key emerging markets.