Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Samsung shipped 81.3 million smartphones worldwide in Q4 2015, growing an above-average 9 percent annually from 74.5 million units in Q4 2014”. Strong demand in China and the United States is expected to help Apple finish the year with 231.5 million phones shipped, an increase of 20.2 percent over the previous year.
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On Tuesday, Apple reported the slowest growth in iPhones since the company began selling the smartphones in 2007 and cautioned that iPhone sales are in for their first slump ever in the March quarter.
Lenovo (including Motorola) sold 74 million smartphones, achieving 24.5 percent growth in smartphone shipments in 2015. Apple followed in second position with its 74.8 million units shipped, capturing an 18.7 per cent market share and growing 0.4 per cent year-on-year. It may not have shipped as many as Samsung or Apple, but neither of those two matched the company’s impressive 44% growth. Global smartphone shipments in 2015 jumped slightly more than 10 percent to an unprecedented 1.43 billion units, International Data Corp. Meanwhile, Apple is also predicted to see its smartphone sales drop this year compared to 2015.
Market researcher Gartner forecasts that shipments of mobile phones will rise only 2.6 percent in 2016 and that revenue will fall. For the full year, the worldwide smartphone market saw a total of 1432.9 million units shipped, marking the highest year of shipments on record, up 10.1% from the 1301.7 million units shipped in 2014.
“To combat Apple at the high-end, competing vendors will need to bring value to consumers to stay relevant in the market”, said Anthony Scarsella, Research Manager with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. “While there is a lot of uncertainty around the economic slowdown in China, Huawei is one of the few brands from China that has successfully diversified worldwide, with nearly half of its shipments going outside of China”.
“Huawei is poised to be in a good position to hold onto a strong number three over the next year”. The report also noted that due to a heavy saturation of smartphones in markets such as the U.S., Europe and China, vendors would focus on premium-looking mid-tier devices in 2016.
The outlook is also challenging for the smartphone industry. Third place Huawei had a strong fourth quarter as shipments rose 37% year-over-year to 32.4 million.
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Rounding out the top five were Chinese-based handset makers Lenovo and Xiaomi.
