In general, 2014 is probably not going to go down as a year that Samsung wants to remember. Although the company is still the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla in the room amongst Android mobile device manufacturers, the hold on the top has loosened some with accompanying negative impacts. Probably most disturbing for Samsung have been the missed sales and financial targets for their mobile device lines of business and products. As the year comes to a close though, new customer satisfaction data shows the company has managed to jump past their biggest rival in the larger smartphone market, besting Apple by a couple points on the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
The data shows Samsung’s reception by consumers has been an up and down affair since 2004, although recent years have seen consistent improvement year to year. For 2014 Samsung achieved a score of 81 on the index, a 6.6% increase compared to the prior year. Meanwhile, Apple, which only started getting measured in 2012, has been on a slow downward trend, falling to a score of 79 this year, a 2.5% decrease compared to 2013.
Most of the other manufacturers in the survey of satisfaction with cellular telephones are only trailing by a few points with Nokia and Motorola/Google sitting at a score of 77, HTC at 75, BlackBerry at 74 and LG at 73. However, only Samsung and Apple managed to perform better than the industry as a whole where customers scored satisfaction at 78 on the ACSI.
Do you think this is a major victory for Samsung?
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