New data from market intelligence firm IDC this week places Apple as the third largest manufacturer of mobile phones, in a fourth quarter of 2011 which overall showed surprisingly little growth on the same period of 2010.

Apple’s latest model, the iPhone 4S, was partly responsible for a jump of almost double the number of units shipped over the last calendar year compared to 2010, increasing from 47.5 million to 93.2 million in a jump of over 96%.

With Apple gaining so much ground in the smartphone race for market share, there had to be losers and the primary victim of the surge was LG, whose reported drop of almost 25 percentage points in smartphone sales between the end of 2010 and two months ago has badly affected shareholder confidence.

The Korean manufacturer’s overall market share is only down from 8.4% to 5.7%, though considering the huge amount of smartphones purchased in that year (nearly one and a half billion, up 11.1% on 2010), LG’s growth has certainly slowed compared to the iPhone’s success story.

The top two mobile makers remained unchanged with Samsung in second after near one-fifth growth year-on-year, whilst leaders Nokia, who also reported a loss of ground to Apple maintain top spot despite sales down from 453 million during 2010 to 417 over the last calendar year.