The smartphone audience in EU5 is growing: 131.5 million handset owners; penetration hits 55%

Digital audience measurement company comScore today released data from its MobiLens service, reporting key mobile trends across the five leading European markets (EU5), namely France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK based on survey results.

Needless to say, the smartphone audience is growing across the board.

Smartphone penetration in Europe

During the three-month average period ending October 2012, comScore estimates that the current smartphone penetration across the EU5 markets is 54.6 percent of mobile phone users, a 13 percentage point increase compared to the same period last year.

It’s worth noting that comScore recently estimated that 15.5 percent of European smartphone users also own a tablet.

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Spain had the highest smartphone penetration at 63.2 percent (and also showed the strongest growth with a 14.8 percentage point gain), followed by the UK with 62.3 percent and France with 51.4 percent.

Overall, the European smartphone audience increased 35 percent in the past year, from 97.7 million in October 2011 to 131.5 million in October 2012, according to comScore.

Zooming in on the UK

In the UK, comScore says Apple remains the leading handset manufacturer, capturing 28 percent of the market with 8.6 million users, followed by Samsung with a 24 percent market share.

Samsung has shown remarkable growth, however, doubling its UK market share from 11.2 percent to 24 percent in just a year. RIM ranks third with a 15.2 percent share, followed closely by HTC with a 15 percent share.

Also see: IDC: ‘smart connected device’ shipments reach record 303.6m in Q3 2012, led by Apple and Samsung

This is also apparent when you look at the platform share, where Google’s Android OS grabs 46.6 percent of the UK smartphone audience of nearly 31 million smartphone owners, compared to Apple iOS’s 28 percent.

Apple is followed by RIM, which held a 15.2 percent share of the operating system market in the three-month average period ending October 2012.

Top image credit: Thinkstock