Kantar Worldpanel has released its analysis of the December smartphone sales, and it makes for good reading for Windows Phone. Market Share in the UK (for the month ending Dec 23rd 2012) was up to 5.9, Italy reaching 13.9%, and the EU overall was 5.4% (up from 2.6% in the same period last year).

US numbers are not as stellar, with 2.6% for Dec 2012 (compared to 2.4% for 2011), and that's a slight drop from the month previously, which was 2.7%. An optimist would put that down to staistical errors in the sampling rate!

While the take up of Windows Phone is going to be affected by many factors over a single month, the upward trend of Windows Phone market share shows the health of the ecosystem and the fact that it is winning over more consumers every day. While hard numbers and sales figures are not that easy to come by, mobile analysts, second hand research, and the occasional direct quote from Steve Ballmer all point to Windows Phone being in a (rather shallow) ascendancy.

And of course the market is ever growing, so in terms of units sold the increase in raw numbers is far more than the precentage of market share would indicate.

All the numbers and more observations can be found via Kantar's website.