In Fast Company's latest interview with Apple's CEO Tim Cook, Cook noted that "There's this thing in technology, almost a disease, where the definition of success is making the most. How many clicks did you get, how many active users do you have, how many units did you sell? Everybody in technology seems to want big numbers. Steve never got carried away with that. He focused on making the best."

That was a humorous moment in the interview with Cook considering that Cook is noted for his statistical flare during every Apple event. He delights in the so-called statistical "disease" by telling us how Macs have outpaced the growth of the industry for the last 10 or more quarters or how many iPads they've sold over the competition or that iOS clobbers Android in adoption rates.

Yet beside that bit of humor, a recent study by Hong Kong's Counterpoint published an interesting infographic noted below showing us how smartphone sales are broken down worldwide and where Apple sits within these statistics.

The global mobile phone industry reached 527 million units phones shipments in Q4 2014, a growth of 12% over Q4 2013. Smartphone remained the key segment with 72.5% of the share of the total handset shipments. This segment had a growth of 26% (y-o-y) reaching 382 million shipments in Q4 2014.

China smartphone market still remains bigger than North-America, Latin America, the Middle and East Africa combined.

LTE was the fastest growing segment as the total demand more than doubled compared to last year. Please check the below infographic for more interesting insights.

Earlier this month we posted a report titled "Apple is Working with Intel on a New Special Smartphone for Emerging Markets." If VentureBeat's rumor pans out, then it's likely a new kind of iPhone will be designed to address markets like India, Latin America and the Middle East where Apple's iPhone only has a small high-end segment to sell into. If the vast majority of youth in certain markets get too used to Android, it makes it more difficult for Apple to win over those users to the high-end iPhone in later years.

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