Strong iPhone demand in the run-up to Christmas saw Android’s share of the U.S. smartphone market decline for the first time since September 2013.
According to figures published by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech on Wednesday, in the three months ending November 2014, Google’s operating system saw its share of EU5 smartphone sales fall to 69.9% from 73.1% a year earlier.
"Great Britain saw the strongest share decline for Android at 6.7 percentage points," said Dominic Sunnebo, strategic insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Europe, in a statement.
The research firm said Apple’s U.K. market share gain, triggered by the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus launches, saw iOS account for 42.5% of smartphone sales in the three months to 30 November, an improvement of 12.2 percentage points. In the U.S., Apple took a 47.4% share of sales, up by 4.3 percentage points.
It was a similar story in Germany, Italy and Spain, where iOS’s share improved at the expense of Android’s. The swing was even more dramatic in Australia, where Android’s share of smartphone sales fell by 10.1 percentage points, while iOS’s climbed 9.9 percentage points.
The only country surveyed by Kantar in which Android put in a far stronger performance than iOS was Japan. However, this was attributed to the fact that the iPhone made its debut on NTT DoCoMo’s network in 2013, causing a one-off spike in iPhone sales.
In China though, Android continues to dominate, accounting for 80.4% of smartphone sales in the period, compared to 18.1% for iOS.
"The wide variety of products offered by local manufacturers continues to push Android’s share," said Tamsin Timpson, strategic insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Asia. "Xiaomi remains the biggest contributor to Android’s success as it averaged 30.2% of sales in the three months ending in November, an astonishing 18 percentage point rise over 2013."
Indeed, in a recent memo to staff, Xiaomi CEO and founder Jun Lei revealed that the company shipped 61.12 milli on smartphones in 2014, an increase of 227% on 2013.
