It seems that the global economic crisis has seriously affected the mobile phone industry as reports indicate that there has been a 12.6% market decline in Q4 2008.

The latest analysis suggest that vendors shipped a total of 289 million units in Q4 2008 and not over 330 million as they did in 2007. This means a decrease in numbers that reaches 12.6%, writes Cellular-news.com

However, this problem remains visible just for Q4 as overall in 2008, a total of 1.18 billion units were shipped worldwide. This means an increase of 3.5% from 2007 when 1.14 billion units were shipped.

Most affected was North America followed by Latin America while in Europe and Asia the units were sold without major problems. The most sold brands are Nokia and Samsung, followed by LG, Sony Ericsson and Motorola. It seems that Samsung is investing major efforts in mobile phones and the results seem to be positive.