EGHAM, United Kingdom – Global sales of smartphones topped 1.4 billion units in 2015, up a whopping 14.4 percent from the year before, Gartner Inc. said in a report released Thursday. But in the fourth quarter of last year, smartphone sales only increased 9.7 percent from the same three months in 2014, the slowest growth rate since 2008.
“Low-cost smartphones in emerging markets, and strong demand for premium smartphones, continued to be the driving factors in the smartphone market,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. “An aggressive pricing from local and Chinese brands in the mid-to-low-tier segments in the emerging markets led to consumers upgrading more quickly to affordable smartphones.”
Gupta said that 85 per cent of users in the emerging Asia-Pacific region are replacing their current midrange phone with the same category of phone. Worse yet, the currency devaluation against the US dollar in many emerging markets is leading to further margin pressure on many vendors that import devices.
Current market conditions are leading some vendors to explore setting up factories in India and Indonesia to avoid future unfavorable currency devaluations and high import taxes.
In the fourth quarter of 2015, Samsung and Huawei were the two vendors among the top five smartphone vendor ranking to achieve growth. Apple witnessed its first decline in the smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2015. iPhone sales were down 4.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2015. While Samsung was the number one vendor in smartphone sales, Gartner analysts said the company will need to face some challenges.
“For Samsung to fight off falling sales of premium smartphones, it needs to introduce new flagship smartphones that can compete with iPhones and stop churn to iOS devices,” Gupta said.
With an increase of 53 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2015, Huawei achieved the best performance year on year. Huawei’s increased brand visibility overseas, and its decision to sell almost completely smartphones, led to higher average selling prices (ASPs) in 2015.
For total sales of smartphones in 2015, Samsung maintained the No. 1 position, however its market share declined two percentage points. In 2015, Apple sold 225.9 million iPhones and achieved a market share of 16 per cent in the smartphone market. Huawei’s smartphone sales reached 104 million units in 2015, up 53 per cent year on year.
In the smartphone operating system (OS) market, Android units increased 16.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2015 to account for 80.7 percent of the global market (see Table 3). “Android benefited from continued demand for affordable smartphones and from the slowdown of iOS units in the premium market in the fourth quarter of 2015,” said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner. In the premium segment, despite Apple’s slower year-on year fourth quarter sales, Apple gained share over Samsung in 2015.
Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Market Share: Devices, All Countries, 4Q15 Update”. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.
