Smartphone makers’ market shares are also suffering a shakeup: while Samsung remains the biggest player with over 21 percent share, down over four percentage points over the previous year.
Advertisement
North American purchases rose 10 percent to 44.4 million in the quarter, and retail-level dollar volume shot up 19 percent to $18.2 billion, based on unsubsidized retail pricing, Nuremburg, Germany-based GfK said.
“This trend can be seen from TVs down to smartphones”.
With smartphone sales dipping across global markets, especially in China where sales have stagnated, Apple has done well to register a growth where Samsung, Blackberry and Microsoft failed.
“We see a price polarization as sales of high- and low-end devices grew at the expense of midranged devices, …”
But sales have been contracting this year, at least in terms of number of units sold, as the market becomes saturated and most Chinese consumers now own smartphones. Led by China, the wireless technology more than doubled its unit share over past year.
In the second quarter of 2015, worldwide smartphone gross sales in worth phrases was up 7% yr-on-yr, whereas in quantity phrases, it grew 5% yr-on-yr, GfK stated in a press release.
The primary goal behind that is the at present low smartphone penetration in the market along with a big intensification of the competitors amongst the smartphone distributors, which can drive ASP erosion permitting extra reasonably priced units in the market, he added.
In total, 329 million smartphones were shipped in the quarter, with Samsung accounting for 72 million handsets in Q2, compared to Apple’s 48 million units.
“India is expected to be the largest contributor of absolute smartphone unit growth globally this year”, Kevin Walsh, director of trends and forecasting at GfK said. Share of large screen devices in N. America hit 70 percent in the quarter, up from 59 percent in the same period last year, driven by strong demand for high-end models.
W Europe had very high LTE penetration levels in smartphones in Q2 2015, with the Nordics taking the top three places: Norway at 90 percent, Denmarkat 89 percent and Sweden at 88 percent. “We forecast unit demand in Developed Asia to grow by 3 percent year-on-year in 2015, driven by Japan and South Korea, which are expected to return to growth in 2Q15”.
Advertisement
That bodes well for companies like Apple (AAPL.US), Samsung (005930.KS) and Huawei, which excel at higher-end models that are both attractive and well designed.
