Samsung's profits fall 20%

The global smartphone market share of South Korea's top smartphone maker Samsung Electronics Co. fell below 20 percent in terms of value for the first time in three years in the fourth quarter of 2014, data showed Monday.
Samsung, which has recently suffered a setback in its market share due to the rise of Chinese firms eating into its low-end handset sales, took up 17.2 percent of the world's smartphone market in the October-December period in terms of revenue, according to the data compiled by Strategy Analytics.
For all of 2014, Samsung took up 25.1 percent of the global smartphone revenue, hovering far below Apple's 37.6 percent, South Korea's News Agency (Yonhap) reported.
U.S.-based Apple Inc., on the other hand, posted a record high in terms of revenue, accounting for 48.9 percent of the global smartphone market, apparently boosted by the rising global popularity of the iPhone 6.
LG Electronics Inc. saw its shares edge up 0.2 percentage point on-year to reach 4.3 percent to stand in the third spot. LG was followed by China's Huawei and Japan's Sony Corp. at 3.8 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively.