HONG KONG (Yonhap News) ― China has emerged as the world’s largest smartphone market on the rising demand of the device, overtaking the United States, a market report showed Wednesday.

The number of smartphones sold in China is estimated to 150 million units between January 2012 and January 2013, industry researcher Flurry said. During the same period, a total of 55 million smartphones were sold in the U.S., according to Flurry.

A total of 246 million units were used in China as of January, while the U.S. has a comparable figure of 230 million, it said.

Flurry expected that the U.S. will not take back the lead from China, given the vast difference in population between the two countries.

“China has over 1.3 billion people while the U.S. has just over 310 million. Considering that the U.S. has the worlds’ third-largest population, the only other country that could feasibly overtake China sometime in the future is India, with a population of just over 1.2 billion,” said Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry.

India currently has only 19 million active smartphones, ranking itself the tenth largest smartphone market. Britain was No. 3 with 43 million units.