'Apple topples Samsung as top global smartphone player in Q4'

For the whole 2016 year, Samsung, however, continued to led the smartphone market with a market share of 21 percent.

Its smartphone shipments declined 4 percent year-on-year, registering 310 million units during the year.

Interestingly, the US, China and India alone contributed to almost 50 percent of the total smartphone shipments in 2016.

Smartphone shipments reached 1,512 million units in CY 2016, of which 440 million units smartphones were shipped in the fourth quarter alone.

"The global smartphone market grew by a modest three percent y-o-y in CY 2016 with major brands such as Apple and Samsung seeing an annual decline in growth," CounterPoint Research Research Analyst Shobhit Srivastava said.

He added that bulk of the growth was driven by three major Chinese brands -- Huawei, Oppo and vivo -- which combined grew a healthy 57 percent y-o-y shipping more than 300 million units globally.

"2016 was the inflection point for LTE as a technology as it scaled down to lower price points (sub USD 75). LTE adoption was much faster compared to any other previous cellular technologies as the total LTE smartphone demand crossed a billion units in 2016," Counterpoint Research Associate Director Tarun Pathak said.