Apple and Samsung suffer in Q3 global smartphone sales

This is bad news for Apple and Samsung. In Q3 2018, Huawei and Xiaomi made huge gains and helped smartphones sales grow by 1.4%. In 3Q2018, total of 389 million units of smartphones were shipped. Huawei managed to push Apple from #2 to #3 and Xiaomi is now getting closer to Apple. If this continues, we may see Apple out of top 5 in a year or two.

“If we had taken both Huawei and Xiaomi out of the global smartphone vendors list, smartphone sales to end users would have declined by 5.2 percent,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. “Led by low-price smartphones, enhanced camera features and high-quality resolution displays, top Chinese mobile phone manufacturers boosted their sales across emerging markets in the third quarter of 2018.”

While Apple’s sales were nearly flat when compared to same quarter in 2017. Samsung’s though declined a lot, resulting in narrowing the gap to Huawei. Huawei managed to increase their shipments a lot, thanks to high demand across the globe. Huawei was one of the brands that had very good sales during holiday season and that showed in this report. Xiaomi too managed to have good increase in sales. OPPO, like Apple, had almost flat quarter. 

Table 1

Worldwide Top 5 Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor in 3Q18 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (December 2018)