Global smartphone shipments grew by 1% in Q3 2019, representing the first year-on-year (YoY) market increase in two years.
New figures from Canalys indicate that 352 million smartphones shipped last quarter, compared to 349 million on the corresponding period last year. The growth, while modest, bucks a trend that dates back to 2017 which saw the smartphone industry’s first ever sales decline.
Digging down into the numbers reveal that Samsung remains at the top of the pack, with a two percentage point market share increase compared to Q3 2018. However, China’s Huawei stole considerable ground on its Korean rival, growing from 14.9% market share to 19% — just 3.4% behind Samsung.
Elsewhere, Apple’s market share fell from 13.4% to 12.3%, translating into a 7% overall drop in smartphone shipments. This was largely due to weak sales of the iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max which launched last September. Canalys notes that Apple’s numbers could have been lower had it only launched 2 iPhones, as it normally does. Certainly, it’s no secret that Apple’s iPhone sales have been declining, which is why the Cupertino company has been doubling down on growing its services revenue.
Above: Global smartphone shipments for Q3 2019
Image Credit: Canalys
Samsung’s growth can be attributed to a number of factors, including to more models and variety in its high-end devices — the Note10, for example, shipped with two screen sizes for the first time, in addition to a 5G version. According to Canalys, a “better price-to-spec” in its mid-range Galaxy A devices also helped drive its growth, which included the A80 that sports a slide-up rotating camera. Samsung also launched the A90 5G phone last month, further indicating that 5G will play a big part in manufacturers’ sales numbers moving forward.
“5G is the next battleground for Samsung,” said Canalys research director Rushabh Doshi. “It is one of very few smartphone vendors to design its own chipsets and modems. It is not, therefore, restricted to the innovation cycle of a third-party component supplier like Qualcomm. If Samsung moves faster than Qualcomm, it can win the race to mid-range smartphones with 5G.”
The trade ban
Last December, Huawei made noises about catching up with Samsung by the end of 2019, and while the numbers above lend some credence to that claim, it’s unlikely to come to fruition. Last week, the Chinese company announced that it had passed 200 million smartphones already in 2019, two months earlier than last year — but the full impact of the U.S. decision to place Huawei on a trade blacklist has yet to be realized. All new Huawei smartphones cannot ship with Google’s version of Android which will likely deter consumers from buying thedevices. Indeed, Huawei officially announced its new high-end Mate 30 series smartphone lineup last month, but the devices have yet to go on sale outside of China — a sign, perhaps, that Huawei is hoping that it can somehow circumvent the ban on Google’s services.
It’s also worth noting here that a knock-on effect of this trade ban has led to Huawei increasing its domestic sales in China at the expense of its rivals. So any international sales decline in the future could be offset to some degree by sales at home.
“Huawei is not out of the woods yet,” added Canalys senior analyst Ben Stanton. “Its shipments overseas in Q3 were focused on pre-Entity List models, with P30 Lite its best shipper, at close to three million units. But its post-Entity List models, like Mate 30, bring uncertainty because there is resistance from channels in critical overseas markets, like Europe, to support Huawei devices without Google Mobile Services.”