More affordable premium devices from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and Oppo continue to put pressure on established premium smartphone makers like Samsung.
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Smartphone sales have grown only 4.3 per cent in Q2 with players like Oppo seeing 129 per cent growth, says Gartner.
Global sales of smartphones totalled 344 million units in the second quarter of 2016, up 4.3 percent from the same period in 2015 as growth in emerging markets offset a decline in mature markets, according to Gartner.
Apple sales declined in North America as well as in Western Europe.
It notes Samsung improving its own performance too, clawing back some marketshare it recently lost in emerging markets to take a 22.3 per cent slice of sales in the quarter, vs 8.9 per cent for Huawei and 5.4 per cent for Oppo. “Huawei, Oppo and Vivo offer products with better specifications at significantly lower price points”, Ding added. Smartphone sales in the latter regions were up by 9.9 per cent vs a 4.9 per cent decline in mature markets.
“Demand for premium smartphones slowed in the second quarter of 2016 as consumers wait for new hardware launches in the second half of the year”, Gartner Research Director Anshul Gupta said. Today, a Gartner report came out on worldwide smartphone sales that looked at Samsung’s sales holistically by adding in the Galaxy J series smartphones (for Japanese market) and the Galaxy A series designed for the mid-market that Apple doesn’t really compete in.
Overall sales of mobile phones fell by 0.5 percent as feature-phone sales dropped 14 percent and only five vendors from the top 10 showed growth in the quarter.
Xiaomi was the world’s fifth largest smartphone seller at 15.5 million units and its market share declined to 4.5 percent from 4.7.
In the second quarter of 2016, Samsung had almost 10 percent more market share than Apple.
Apple continued its downward trend with a decline of 7.7 percent in the second quarter of 2016.
“The smartphone markets in India and the Philippines are performing well in 2016, with annual growth expected to reach 21 and 26 percent respectively”, noted research analyst Ishan Dutt.
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In terms of the smartphone operating system (OS) market, Android regained share over iOS to achieve an 86 percent share (see Table 2) in the second quarter of 2016.
