The director at Gartner research, Anshul Gupta says that the smartphone sales growth continues to increase in the emerging markets, but was expected to be mixed in other regions, referring to a slowdown in China, which is the biggest country for the smartphone sales. However Africa, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia were the fastest growing territories.
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He added that China has reached “saturation”, its telephone market is actually pushed by alternative, with fewer first-time consumers.
Samsung was the No. 1 smartphone vendor during the second quarter with 21.9 percent of the market, but that was down from 26.2 percent during the same time period past year.
As the amount of people in China buying new smartphones plateaus and matures into an upgrade market, homegrown brands including Huawei, Xiomi and Lenovo will pursue Western markets more aggressively, according to Ben Wood of CCS Insight. Sure, with an estimated 330 million units sold in the second quarter of 2015, phone makers sold more smartphones than a year earlier. By contrast, because of a weaker presence in China, Samsung phones declined 5.3 per cent in overall sales in the quarter, losing 4.3 percentage points in market share.
For 2015, GfK has also forecast that global smartphone sales will grow by six per cent from last year to reach 1.302 billion, with sales value topping $400 billion – an increase of five per cent from last year.
However, in other emerging markets, demand for lower-cost 3G and 4G smartphones meant continued growth. Share of large screen devices in N. America hit 70 percent in the quarter, up from 59 percent in the same period past year, driven by strong demand for high-end models. Dominating the market with 82.2% of the market share was Android OS, while that of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) was 14.6%.
Apple iPhone sales increased 36 percent, which helped Apple gain 2.4 percentage points in market share. iPhone sales in China grew 68 percent to 11.9 million units.
The country accounted for about 30 percent of total smartphones sales during the second quarter, according to the report. Gartner attributed the slowing growth rate to a saturated Chinese market.
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The low barrier to entry into the Android segment will continue to encourage an array of new players. iOS (Apple) had a share of 14.6 per cent, Windows (2.5 per cent) and BlackBerry (0.3 per cent) in the second quarter of 2015.
