In the struggle for market share in the smartphone market, Apple’s iPhone is not doing particularly well. After 12 generations of iPhones, it could only manage to capture around 11% of the global market share during Q2 2019. This means that it was beaten by Samsung, with 22%, and Huawei, with 17%.
For its third fiscal quarter, the firm announced a drop of 12% in iPhone sales to $26bn. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook nevertheless did his best to convince the audience that there was a “significant improvement in iPhone trends”.
According to market research company Canalys, the new iPhone range, which includes the XS, XS Max and XR, failed to deliver a significantly different experience from previous ranges. Strategy Analytics reported that Huawei phones, which have for all practical purposes been tarnished with a bright red warning by the American government, comfortably beat the iPhone with a more than 50% bigger market share.
According to Counterpoint Research’s Associate Director Tarun Pathak, the ripple effect of the American ban will only be felt by Huawei during the next quarter. He predicted that it would be able to partly offset the effect of the ban by focusing on the local Chinese market, but not all.
His company’s research indicates that the global smartphone market shrank by 4.3 million units since last year. The combined international market share of large Chinese smartphone companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi has now reached a whopping 42%.
The latest rankings from Counterpoint Research, Canalys and Strategy Analytics should be seen against the background of a global smartphone market that has been shrinking for the last seven quarters, and smartphones finding themselves in the middle of a trade war between the US and China.
Global advisory company Gartner expects the biggest drops in smartphone sales this year to be in Western Europe, Japan and North America.