Chinese smartphone market is still the largest in the world, but it’s not growing as it used to. Despite all that, Chinese vendors managed to improve their results in the fourth quarter of last year. We’ve already reported that Huawei managed to sell around 109 million handsets last year, Xiaomi shipped out around 70, and Oppo sold 50 million devices. Meizu has also improved quite a bit, in 2015 the company sold 20 million units, which is significantly more compared to 2014 when they managed to ship out ‘only’ 4.4 million smartphones.
That being said, we do have some Q4 2015 results now, courtesy of Digitimes. According to the source, the China-based smartphone manufacturers actually grew 8.8% on quarter, and 18.3% on year to 154.2 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of last year. Now, this data on its own sounds impressive, but if you add the fact that their overseas shipments increased 25.6% on year to 69 million units in Q4 2015, the stats are even more impressive. Overseas shipments were mainly headed to India, Southeast Asia, East Europe, South America and Russia, which was to be expected.
According to the info, Huawei is the top China-based manufacturer in the fourth quarter last year, that company alone shipped out 27 million units. Huawei is followed by Xiaomi, TCL, Oppo and BKK Electronics, each of those companies shipped out over 10 million units in Q4 2015. Now, this isn’t all that surprising considering Huawei has sold 109 million smartphones last year (globally), and became the third smartphone manufacturer in the world. Xiaomi, on the other hand, is not that close as far as sheer sales number go, and they didn’t quite reach their sales goal, but they still managed to ship more devices than last year.
Now, the Chinese smartphone manufacturers actually expect smartphone sales o decline over 20% in the first quarter of this year, mainly because they have tons of leftover in from last year in stock, not to mention that the overseas shipments are slowing down as well. Either way, this will be a rather interesting year, it will be interesting to see what will happen when it comes to Chinese smartphone manufacturers considering quite a few of them are expanding into new markets.