San Francisco: Apple, the world’s most valuable company, sold 8.34 million iPhones in the US in its most recent quarter, fewer than the previous two periods, according to a court filing in its trial against Samsung Electronics.

US sales accounted for 32 per cent of the 26 million smartphones it sold worldwide in the quarter ended June 30, according to an exhibit in a court filing Friday in federal court in San Jose, California. Apple, which is suing Samsung for patent infringement, hadn’t previously given a geographic breakdown of the sales of its biggest product by country.

The fiscal third-quarter total for the US compares with 10.7 million iPhones sold in the preceding three months and the record 15 million sold in the last three months of 2011, the filing showed. The sequential decline is in line with a slowdown seen before in iPhone sales ahead of the release of a new model.

Apple has sold 86 million iPhones in the US since the product debuted in 2007. The filing showed Samsung sold 21.3 million smartphones from mid-2010 to mid-2012.

Last month the Cupertino, California-based company reported total quarterly sales for the product that missed analysts’ predictions, causing its revenue and profit to fall short of estimates for only the second time since 2003.

Apple sold 5.7 million iPads in its home market in the latest quarter, 34 percent of the total of 17 million of the tablet devices it sold worldwide, the court filing also showed.

The trial between Apple and Samsung is the first before a US jury in a battle being waged on four continents for dominance in a smartphone market valued by Bloomberg Industries at $219.1 billion. Each company is trying to persuade jurors at the trial that the other infringed patents covering designs and technology.

Apple shares were little changed at $621.70 at the close in New York, and is up 54 per cent this year.

The case is Apple v Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, 11- cv-01846, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).