While the clash between Apple and Android has been billed the battle of the titans, recent statistics show that the war may be one sided with Android winning the lion’s share of the smartphone market quite comfortably. Lawsuits have piled up in various parts of the world contesting and re-contesting patents and the trash talk in media outlets would have you believe that the two tech giants are going neck-and-neck for the very lucrative smartphone market.
However, sales figures from the analytics firm Gartner show that Android devices account for as much as 87.7% of the total smartphone market, while Apple devices are a distant second at 12.1% of the total volume of all smartphones in the market. Of all the third party providers of Android, perhaps not surprisingly, Samsung is the biggest vendor of smartphones followed by Apple and then the new entrant Huawei that has now made a mark for itself in the list that was released this week.
Samsung earns the tag of being the biggest manufacturer of smartphones in the world, with 85.2 million units shipped in second quarter of 2017 accounting for a whopping 22.5% share in the global market. This figure is actually an improvement over the 76.6 million shipments meaning 22.4% of the market share that Samsung had shipped in the past year, and goes to show how the demand for Android smartphones has actually increased in these years. Next up in the list of most sales of smartphone units is the famed American firm Apple that sold 44.6 million shipments in Q2 accounting for a 12.1% market share, which is a drop from the number of 12.9% last year.
However, this drop was expected as the iPhone 8 is still under development and the sales are expected to rebound when the new product is launched. Next up are the upcoming kid and Chinese heavyweights Huawei who have shipped close to 35.9 million units this year, translating into a market share of around 9.8%. They have closed in quick with Apple and it wouldn’t be a jaw dropping surprise if they overtake the American giants in the next year, especially because they have grown by leaps and bounds since last year – they shipped around 30.6 million shipments that meant only 8.9% of the market share.
A growth by one percentage point may be the most remarkable thing considering the volume of smartphones produces annually and both Apple and Samsung will be wary of Huawei making inroads into markets that they primarily cater to. The rear of the largest manufacturers is brought up by Oppo and Vivo who accounted for 7.1 and 6.6 percentage of the total market share in 2016-17.
The data released also contained region-wise stats on the number of smartphones purchased in the last year, and China was the biggest market for smartphones with 27.7 percentage share of the entire market for smartphones in the world. China was followed closely by the emerging Asia Pacific region that accounted for 21.1 percent of all smartphones produced last year, which means that continental Asia is largest market for smartphones and one in every two produced ends up in the region.
The third on the list was North America which occupied 11% of all sales of smartphones in the world, followed by Western Europe with 9.8% of the market share. Latin America was fifth with 9% of the market share for smartphones. With the focus set on expanding to the huge untapped markets in developing countries such as India and China, the sales of smartphones is only set to grow and while Samsung will likely gain from it, we can also expect new entrants like Huawei and Oppo to eat a large portion of Apple’s share in the market.
Which smartphone do you choose to use? Do you have a preferred Operating System? What makes you choose your Operating System or smartphone manufacturer. Share with us in the section below titled comments.
