Digitimes Research has added up some numbers and divided them by its shoe size and worked out that 112.3 million smartphones were shipped in the China market during the third quarter of 2016.

This is an increase of 5.2 percent on quarter and 5.8 per cent on year and accounting for 30.9 percent of the global total.

But the figures show that the Chinese market is being increasingly sewn up by local suppliers. International vendors shipped 17.1 million units, accounting for 15.2 percent of the shipments and decreasing 2.8 percent on quarter and 36.7 percent on the year.

The growth in shipments was mainly because China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom continued to subsidise purchases of smartphones, mostly inexpensive models, to encourage the shift of 2G and 3G subscribers to 4G, Digitimes Research said.

As of the end of the third quarter, China Mobile had 480.7 million 4G subscribers, China Telecom 107.5 million and China Unicom 88.9 million.

Oppo had the largest market share at 19.9 percent of shipments, followed by Vivo with 15.9 per cent , Huawei Technologies 12.1 percent , Xiaomi Technology 6.3 percent , GiONEE 5.5 percent , LeEco 3.8 percent , Meizu 3.7 percent , ZTE 2.1 percent , Coolpad 1.9 percent , Lenovo 1.6 percent and Hisense 1.2 percent . Apple 9.3 percent, Samsung 5.1 percent and HTC 0.4 percent were the three largest international vendors.

In the fourth quarter of 2016, 118.4 million smartphones will ship in the China market, including 22.5 million units by non-China-based international vendors.