Combination of increase in sales for Huawei, as well as a drop for Samsung and Apple, sees Huawei catching up to the two smartphone giants in sales.
Both Samsung and Apple encounter issues in 2016, causing their sales to suffer with a decline of 4.3%. On the contrary, Huawei saw a massive jump with 26.7% increase in sales. This translated to industry sector share of 8.9% for the Chinese maker; while the South Korean maker took 2% less of the pie at 20.5% and the US counterpart dropping to 14.4% (previously at 15.9%).
In a report by AFP, Gartner analyst Annette Zimmermann said “Chinese makers succeeded in winning market share over last year and Huawei now seems to be the main rival to the two giants, even if the gap remains large.”
“We’re seeing a very real progression compared with earlier years, when the number three maker and the others had struggled to hold on to a market share of more than 4%. Huawei looks likely to strengthen its position again this year,” she added.
In Q4 of 2016, Apple launch iPhone 7 coupled with Samsung’s complications with Note 7 allowed Apple to take the cake in the market with 77 million units sold and a share of 17.9% .
Samsung sold 76.8 million smartphones in the October-December period, giving it a market share of 17.8%, while Huawei sold 40.8 million phones or a market share of 9.5%.
“Preliminary data for the current quarter suggest that Samsung will overtake Apple again. But it’s remarkable that Apple can hold on to that sort of share of the market with a closed eco-system,” the analyst said.
Despite Apple’s slight upper hand, in terms of OS, Android is still the clear favourite, sweeping 81.7% of the market, with iOS accounting for 17.9%.
