The smartphone market has been a massive growth industry for about the last ten years, and with many Android manufacturers seeking to dominate the market for lower cost handsets, it’s to be expected that at some point, most people on Earth will own a smartphone.
However, at the moment, that market growth appears to have slowed down, as most people who want or need a modern smartphone already have one.
A report from Gartner published this week indicates that the two biggest manufacturers of smartphones, Samsung and Apple, both had decreasing sales in the third quarter of 2016 when compared to the year before. What’s more, sales for smartphones worldwide only grew by 5.4 percent from 2015, and this growth has come from a few smaller handset makers that have been growing quickly.
After Samsung and Apple, who held about 20 and 10 percent of the global market share respectively in Q3 2016, came three Chinese companies who actually grew compared to 2015, Huawei, Oppo, and BBK Communication Equipment. Those three companies from a combined 15 percent market share to over 20 percent, while Samsung’s market share fell from 23.6 percent down to 19.2 percent. Apple’s share only dropped 1.5 percent, from 13 to 11.5 year over year.
The Galaxy Note 7 recall fiasco has definitely affected sales of Samsung smartphones, but the gains made by Huawei in the last year put it less than three percent behind Apple in market share, and the company could rise to challenge even Samsung’s position in the next couple of years.
[source]Gartner[/source]
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