Samsung, LG, Nokia: Three Brands, One Third of the Archive

Our archive counts 107 different brands — from Nokia to names almost forgotten like Sewon or Innostream. But the distribution is anything but uniform: Samsung alone covers 15.5% of all catalogued models (825 out of 5,336), more than double the second brand by number of models, LG (411, 7.7%).

It comes as a surprise to anyone expecting Nokia to be in the lead: in our archive, by number of catalogued models, Nokia is third (397 models, 7.4%) — behind both Samsung and LG. This isn't a sales or popularity ranking (for that there are the real rankings based on votes and comments), but the pure count of the models each brand put on the market during the period covered by the archive: whoever produced more variants, not necessarily whoever sold the most.

Put together, the top three brands cover 30.6% of the entire archive — almost one model in three carries one of these three names. The remaining 104 brands split the rest among themselves: many with just a few dozen models, some with only one or two, a testament to how fragmented the mobile phone market was in the early 2000s, before the industry consolidated around a handful of major manufacturers.

Want to find out which brands on this list no longer exist? We talk about it in Brands That No Longer Exist.