Apple is now the world leader in smartphone sales, overtaking Samsung in the fourth quarter of 2014.

Led by the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple sold a whopping 74.8 million handsets, up from 50 million in the third quarter. Samsung, in contrast, sold 73 million handsets.

"Samsung continues to struggle to control its falling smartphone share, which was at its highest in the third quarter of 2013," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. "This downward trend shows that Samsung's share of profitable premium smartphone users has come under significant pressure."

2014 was a big year for smartphone sales, with it being the first year that sales surpassed the 1 billion mark.

Apple took a rather large gamble in 2014, which seems to have paid off. The company decided to enter the phablet market, releasing the iPhone 6 Plus, which gave Apple that extra boost to come out on top. The release of the iPhone 6 Plus seems to have tempted many users to make the jump over to Apple, whereas previously only Android phablets were available to consumers.

It's important to note that Samsung remained the top smartphone seller in 2014, despite the fourth quarter loss that it suffered. In 2014, Samsung sold a huge 307 million smartphones, with Apple selling 191 million. It is unlikely that Samsung will be dethroned anytime soon when it comes to sales during the entire year because of the fact that Apple releases its new smartphones towards the end of the year.

Apple beating out Samsung isn't the only big thing that happened in smartphone sales during the end of 2014. Lenovo, which acquired Motorola in October, jumped into the third spot, now holding a 6.6 percent market share. This is a growth of 46.6 percent compared to last year.

A number of Chinese companies, including the likes of Huawei and Xiaomi, improved their sales quite a bit, largely increasing their market share in the midrange and low-end smartphone markets.

"Chinese vendors are no longer followers," said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner. "They are producing higher quality devices with appealing new hardware features that can rival the more established players in the mobile phone market."

The war for emerging markets has well and truly begun among smartphone manufacturers, with companies releasing more and more smartphones for budget-minded shoppers in markets such as China. This change in focus is great for the Android operating system, which saw a market share rise of 2.2 percent in 2014.