The global smartphone market recorded its slowest rate of growth for a couple of years in the second quarter of this year, hurt by declining sales in China, new research published on Thursday showed.
Smartphone sales worldwide came in at 330 million in the three months to the end of June, up 13.5% on the year-ago quarter, according to Gartner.
30% of those units were sold in China, but said sales in the country were down by 4% year-on-year.
"[China’s] poor performance negatively affected the performance of the mobile phone market in the second qu arter," said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner.
"China has reached saturation — its phone market is essentially driven by replacement, with fewer first-time buyers," Gupta said. "Beyond the lower-end phone segment, the appeal of premium smartphones will be key for vendors to attract upgrades and to maintain or grow their market share in China."
Weakness in China also impacted on Android. Google’s operating system claimed an 82.2% share of the global market in Q2, down from 83.8% a year earlier, hit by the Chinese market in general and by arch-rival Apple’s strong performance there; the iPhone maker sold 11.9 million smartphones in China last quarter, up by 68%.
Apple saw its global smartphone share grow last quarter to 14.6% from 12.2%, thanks to 48.1 million unit sales, 12.7 million more than it sold in the year-earlier period.
Market leader Samsung sold 72.1 million smartphones, some 4 million fewer than in Q2 last year, as its market share contracted by more than four percentage points to 21.9%.
Third-placed Huawei increased sales by more than 8 million to 25.8 million, growing its market share to 7.8%. Fellow Chinese players Lenovo and Xiaomi came in fourth and fifth respectively.
"The low barrier to entry into the Android segment will continue to encourage an array of new players, adding to further disruptions coming from Chinese manufacturing and innovative Internet players with new business models that are not reliant on hardware margins," Gupta predicted.
