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Chinese brands drive global smartphone growth

Cape Town - Smartphones are showing healthy growth, but the gap between winning and losing manufacturers is growing, new data shows.

According data from Juniper Research, global smartphone shipments reached 338 million units in the quarter ending June 2015, representing growth of 16%.

But most of growth was down to mid-range manufacturer Huawei which jumped ahead of rival with 30 million shipments, followed by Xiaomi at 20.5 million.

Jupiter said that there were differences in strategy between the two Chinese firms.

"Juniper notes that the key difference between Huawei and Xiaomi is that Huawei is currently making an effort to expand beyond Asia. Xiaomi is not, leaving it vulnerable to the slowing of the Chinese market, which is also affecting ZTE."

Chinese giant

Manufacturing challenges for the curved display Galaxy S6 Edge continued to hurt Samsung, which suffered continued declines. The South Korean giant indicated that soft sales of the Galaxy S6 could see the company dropping the price to boost sales.

China has emerged as a key driver of smartphone sales and, in particular, Juniper found that Apple was the star performer in this market.

"Apple's record-breaking streak with the iPhone continues, with 47.5 million unit sales fuelled by growth in China, with year-on-year revenues for the region increasing 112% to over $13bn."

The California company has expressed its pleasure at the growth it is experiencing, thanks in part, to China.

Microsoft is working to expand the Windows smartphone market. (Duncan Alfreds, Fin24)

"In the third quarter our year-over-year growth rate accelerated from the first half of fiscal 2015, with revenue up 33% and earnings per share up 45%," said Luca Maestri, Apple chief financial officer.

Juniper found that former smartphone king BlackBerry continued to suffer declines, shipping a fraction under one million phones and significantly reducing its launch cycle from four devices per year to one or two.

South Korean brand LG declined by 3%, shipping 14.1 million phones, said Juniper.

That translates into a profit margin of $172 000, or 1.2c per phone sold for LG.

Juniper also found that Microsoft is seeing some traction for its Lumia smartphones, shipping 8.4 million in anticipation of Windows 10 which the company makes available for free to OEMs.

That represents a 12% increase for the company which had to cut 7 800 jobs as losses from its Nokia acquisition weighed on profits.

Overall, Microsoft announced a net loss of $3.19bn in the second quarter.


- Follow Duncan on Twitter

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