Apple’s falling sales coupled to strong growth from emerging Chinese brands saw the iPhone’s worldwide market share drop just over three points from 17.9% in the first quarter of 2015 to 14.8% in the same quarter this year, according to Gartner.
Although a saturated smartphone market is part of the challenge faced by Apple, global smartphone sales did continue to grow, by 3.9% to 349M units.
Market leader Samsung also saw its share fall in the same period …
Gartner’s numbers show Samsung’s market share falling from 24.1% to 23.2%.
The big winners were Chinese brands Huawei and Oppo. Huawei saw its share climb from 5.4% to 8.3%, while Oppo doubled its slice of the cake from 2% to 4.6%. Apple clone-maker Xiaomi, however, was almost static at 4.3%.
As investors are unsure which way they should bet, Apple has been increasingly emphasising the potential for revenue from services thanks to a market of more than a billion active devices.
“In a slowing smartphone market where large vendors are experiencing growth saturation, emerging brands are disrupting existing brands’ long-standing business models to increase their share,” Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner, said in a statement. “With such changing smartphone market dynamics, Chinese brands are emerging as the new top global brands.”
Via Fortune and Indian Express. Photo: CNBC.
