Samsung's Exynos chipset division has become the third largest supplier in the smartphone world, displacing Apple, which slid to fourth, according to data from Counterpoint Research.

Exynos chips enjoyed a 14.1% market share in 2019, up 2.2 percentage points compared to the year before. This is thanks to solid growth in North America and India. Samsung and Huawei are the only vendors in the global Top 5 to post growth.

Apple, meanwhile, is down 0.5 percentage points to 13.1% share for a fourth place finish, ahead of Huawei in fifth.

Qualcomm and MediaTek retain their leading positions with 33.4% and 24.6% market share, respectively.

It will be interesting to see how the situation develops this year. Samsung already uses some MediaTek chips for select models on the lower end of the scale and will use even more for affordable 5G phones. OnePlus, a lifetime Qualcomm client, is set to introduce the OnePlus 8 Lite with a MediaTek Dimensity chipset.

Samsung's chip division hasn't been standing still either. It found a new client in vivo (for the X30 phones). Also, development of custom CPU cores was shut down, but the company partnered up with AMD to bring Radeon GPU tech to its Exynos chipsets.

Via