Published in Mobiles

Smartphone figures are rubbish

by on02 February 2018


Key players lose ground

Number crunchers at IDC have added up some figures and divided them by its collective shoe size and worked out that the smartphone market is continuing to shrink with all key players losing ground.

In the fourth quarter 2017, global smartphone shipments reached 403.5 million units and decreased by 6.3 percent in comparison to the same period of 2016.

Apple is the market leader, having sold 77.3 million shipped units and market share of 19.2 percent. But it was down by 1.3 percent.

Its closest rival, Samsung, shipped 74.1 million units and got 18.4 percent of the market. Thus it’s 4.4 percent down in comparison to the Q4, 2016. The third position belongs to Huawei, which shipped 41 million units and got 9.7 percent of the market share. It’s down by 9.7 percent from the same period of last year.

The winner from the figures is Xiaomi. It’s fourth with a growth of 96.9 percent. It shipped 28.1 million units and got a market share of seven percent. OPPO is the fifth with 24.7 million units and a market share of 6.8 percent. It’s down by 13.2 percent.

Apart from this, IDC also presented a report for 2016 global market shipments. According to it, Samsung was the first with 317.3 million units and market share of 21.6 percent. Apple was the second with 215.8 million units and market share of 14.7 percent. It is followed by Huawei with 153.1 million sold smartphones (14.7 percent), while Xiaomi was the fifth with 92.4 million units and a market share of 6.3 percent.

The Tame Apple Press is doing its best to spin the figures as being proof that Apple is the number one phone maker having beaten Samsung. But it is ignoring the fact that Apple should have cleaned Samsung’s clock in that quarter. Samsung released its new Galaxy S8 and Note eight devices in the third quarter while Apple’s  iPhone X should have inflated its sales over Christmas. The fact it didn’t, and in fact, Apple’s sales were down should be rather worrying for Jobs’ Mob.

Last modified on 02 February 2018
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