By Adedapo Adesanya
Samsung recorded the most sales to end-users in the third quarter of 2020 as it sold 80.8 million units, indicating a 22 per cent market share of the smartphone sale market.
This followed an improvement in Q3 sales after seeing a slump in the early months of the year, according to the latest findings from research firm Gartner.
Following Samsung was Huawei, who was in the second spot, but is seeing a year-on-year decline in sales. Its third-quarter sales for 2020 were 51.8 million units, down from 65.8 million units last year.
Huawei’s slight decline compared to last year saw one of its core competitors Xiaomi grow its share from 8.5 per cent in 2019 to 12.1 per cent this year, taking the third spot from Apple, who sold 44.4 million units as against 2019’s 32.9 million units.
Huawei, despite some contraction, still holds 14.1 per cent market share, but it is lower than 16.9 per cent market share last year. Its annual growth saw a significant decline of 21.3 per cent.
Apple takes the fourth position in global smartphone sales figures with 40.5 million units in Q3 2020 and a market share of 11.1 per cent. It saw an annual decline of 0.6 per cent.
Despite a late start to the iPhone 12 lineup, Apple posted a record quarter for its fourth quarter in 2020.
Oppo becomes a part of the top five original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to achieve the highest smartphone sales globally. It sold over 29.8 million units in Q3 2020 raking in a market share of 8.2 per cent. Its annual growth also saw a decline of 2.3 per cent.
Gartner noted that worldwide smartphone sales to end-users totalled 366 million units in the third quarter of 2020, down 5.7 per cent from the third quarter of 2019.
Overall global mobile phone sales to end users totalled 401 million units, a decline of 8.7 per cent year-over-year. The research firm explained that quarterly smartphone sales saw a slump in the early quarters of 2020 due to the COVID-19 crisis but noted that a sequential recovery was noticed in the third quarter.
Speaking on this, Mr Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner said, “Early signs of recovery can be seen in a few markets, including parts of mature Asia/Pacific and Latin America. Near normal conditions in China improved smartphone production to fill in the supply gap in the third quarter which benefited sales to some extent.
“For the first time this year, smartphone sales to end-users in three of the top five markets i.e., India, Indonesia and Brazil increased, growing 9.3 per cent, 8.5 per cent, and 3.3 per cent, respectively.”
