Samsung has regained its position over Apple as the world’s largest smartphone vendor by volume, according to new stats from Strategy Analytics.

The analysts claim that global smartphone shipments grew 21 percent annually, to hit 345 million units in the first three months of 2015.

Of these, Samsung shipped 83.2 million smartphones worldwide, meaning it captured 24 percent marketshare for the first quarter. Apple, meanwhile, shipped 61.2 million smartphones to represent 18 percent of the marketshare.

After this, Lenovo-Motorola held on to third place, while Huawei took fourth, although both company’s respective marketshares were considerably less than either Apple’s or Samsung’s.

But while it’s definitely something for Samsung to crow about as it rebuilds itself after a difficult period, the news still isn’t unanimously positive for the South Korean tech giant.

For one thing, the 24 percent marketshare is impressive, but it’s actually down from 31 percent one year earlier. Samsung faces particularly large challenges in Asia, where it is squeezed at both the top end (by Apple) and the bottom end, by upstart companies like Xiaomi.

Apple, conversely, saw its marketshare rise from the 15 percent it represented in the fourth quarter of last year.

Ultimately, it’s worth taking these numbers with a slight pinch of salt, based on the fact that they refer to shipments rather than sales. Of course there’s a correlation between the two in most instances, but Samsung’s misjudged the popularity of its devices before — and ended up shipping far more than the market demanded.

We’ll see what happens.

Source: PRNewswire