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Chinese rivals eat into Samsung’s smartphone market

Johannesburg - South Korean electronics maker Samsung is bleeding its dominant global smartphone market share to up-and-coming Chinese rivals.

This is according to Gartner’s 2014 third quarter market research, which indicates that overall global smartphone sales grew 20.3% in the period to top 301 million units.

Top smartphone maker Samsung has a smaller slice of the global market as its sales dipped from 80.356 million units in Q3 in 2013 to 73.212 million for the same quarter this year. This means that Samsung’s global share of the smartphone market has fallen from 32.1% a year ago to 24.4% this year.

US tech giant Apple has the second biggest share of the smartphone market at 12.7%. Apple sold 38.186 million units in Q3 2014 compared to 30.33 million in the same period last year.

But it is Chinese smartphone makers that have seen the biggest jump in growth.

Huawei has grown from selling 11.665 million smartphones in Q3 2013 to 15.934 million in the same period in 2014, marking a third placed 5.3% share of the global market.

Xiaomi has also raced into fourth position after dramatically increasing its sales from 3.617 million units in Q3 2013 to 15.772 million in the same period this year. Lenovo has further seen its smartphone sales grow from 12.882 million in Q3 2013 to 15.011 million this year.

“With the ability to undercut cost and offer top specs Chinese brands are well positioned to expand in the premium phone market too and address the needs of upgrade users that aspire to premium phones, but cannot afford Apple or Samsung high-end products,” said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner.

“The smartphone market is more than ever in flux as more players step up their game in this space,” added Cozza.

Android dominates

Meanwhile, smartphones equipped with Google’s Android operating system (OS) top consumers’ preferences with an 83.1% share of the market in Q3 2014.

Apple’s iOS follows with a 12.7% share, while Windows equipped smartphones are at 3% and BlackBerry at 0.8%.


A snapshot of the world's leading smartphone operating systems. (Gartner)

Smartphones start to outsell feature handsets

Gartner predicts that by 2018, nine out of ten phones will be smartphones.

Already, in the third quarter of 2014, Gartner has said that smartphones accounted for 66% of the world’s total mobile phone market.

Demand for more basic feature phones then is falling rapidly.

“Sales of feature phones declined 25% in the third quarter of 2014 because the difference in price between feature phones and low-cost Android smartphones is reducing further,” said Cozza.

Lower smartphone prices have been witnessed in South Africa too as Fin24 last month reported on how certain devices are hovering around the R1 000 mark.

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