Meanwhile, in the third quarter, Samsung continued targeting premium handsets with the launch of its new flagship devices, the Galaxy S6 Edge+ and its Note 5, in August.
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Huawei smartphone shipments to Europe nearly doubled, growing by 98 percent year on year, with the company’s smartphones now holding 12.4 percent overall market share in Spain; 45.7 percent market share in Spain’s high-end device sector; 10.9 percent overall market share in Italy; and 27.9 percent of high-end smartphone market share in Italy.
Africa is steadily becoming a hot market for smartphone manufacturers led by Samsung, TECNO, Microsoft, Infinix, Obbi and recently Xiaomi which is set to launch before the end of this year. Older models also sold “vigorously” during the quarter, thanks to recent price cuts across all models.
Yesterday Apple reported another record breaking quarter with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook stating that 2015 was the best year Apple ever recorded in history. The figure is 6.1 percent higher than the number of phones Samsung sold in the same quarter previous year.
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The company has also been granted the seal of approval by Google, who has partnered with Huawei to build the premium Nexus 6P, which should help its brand recognition in the USA “Huawei will use the Nexus win to increased visibility for their brand and smartphone quality in the mobile industry and among the savvy early adopters who typically buy Nexus devices”, Ian Fogg, mobile analyst with IHS Technologies, told IBT. All other vendors combined to ship an estimated 159.1 million smartphones. There are a ton of smartphone OEMs over there trying to grab a piece of the market share. Chinese companies Huawei, Lenovo, and Xiaomi rounded up the top five. Motorola’s strong markets are in North America and Latin America, where its variants of Moto X, G, and E hit on attractive price tiers. Lenovo/Motorola saw a big fall from 7.6% to either 5% or 5.3%, while Xiaomi experienced a smaller drop … The smartphone market share of Xiaomi was flat 5.2 percent in Q3 2015. In mature and subsidized markets, IDC expects a wide range of contract offers from carriers “will put pressure directly on Android [ original equipment manufacturers] with offerings that are greater than $500”.
