Global smartphone sales set new records in 2014, with 1.2bn smartphones sold across the whole year, and sales of $115bn in just Q4, an increase of 20 per cent year-on-year according to data from GfK.

Looking at Q4s results in closer detail, almost every region saw year-on-year growth in terms of both units sold and revenues, with Developed APAC as the sole exception, as subsidy changes in South Korea slowed down the already mature market.

Latin America saw tremendous growth in both Q4, where it saw 36m units sold, a 43 per cent increase year-on-year, and across the year as a whole, with shipments up 59 per cent on 2013 and revenues up 37 per cent to around $10bn (£6.49bn).

China remained the biggest market in both unit and value sales, and will do so for the foreseeable future, but growth slowed dramatically in the second half of 2014, with shipments flat year-on-year in Q4. Despite this, revenues from smartphone sales in China hit the highest ever quarterly figure, bringing in $28bn.

“The increase in the value of units sold in China, despite the recent plateauing of unit sales, is due to consumers rapid adoption of higher priced smartphones with larger screen sizes,” said Kevin Walsh, director of trends and forecasting at GfK. “This is a trend seen in most markets and GfK global data shows that the 5 to 5.6 inch segment grew by more than 130 per cent year-on-year in the last quarter of 2014 and by nearly 150 per cent in the full year. In 2015, we forecast this segment to become the dominant screen size band, surpassing 4 to 4.5 inch for the first time.”