As many of you know, Xiaomi is one of China’s largest smartphone manufacturers. This company was, and still is the number one smartphone manufacturer in China, but only as far as Chinese smartphone market goes, and if we look at the whole 2015 as a whole. Huawei is the number one China-based smartphone OEM, this company even managed to become world‘s third-largest smartphone OEM in 2015. Xiaomi is still not active in enough markets in order to compete with Xiaomi in this regard, but they have plenty of firepower in China to battle Huawei and a number of other companies.
That being said, IDC has released some new info regarding market share in China, and these findings might surprise you. IDC has released Q4 2015 results for the Chinese smartphone market, and according to those results, Xiaomi has been trumped by both Huawei and Apple. Keep in mind that Xiaomi remains no. 1 in China for 2015 as a whole though, just to be clear. According to IDC, Xiaomi managed to grab 14.4% of Chinese smartphone market share in Q4 2015, while Huawei and Apple grabbed 15.2% and 14.6%, respectively. According to an earlier report by IDC, Xiaomi shipped 64.9 million smartphones in China last year, which represents a year-on-year (YoY) increase of 23.2%. Both Huawei and Apple actually managed to achieve more than 50% year-on-year growth in the country last year, so it’s not exactly surprising they managed to trump Xiaomi in the fourth quarter of last year.
Now, as far as 2015 is considered, Xiaomi is still the 1st-placed smartphone manufacturer in China, the company held 15% market share in the country according to IDC, while Huawei managed to grab 14.5%. “Xiaomi entered the market at a time when the China smartphone market was still growing, and was able to capture a significant market share with its disruptive sales model. Huawei, with its investments in R&D, strong products, branding and channel connections, saw it having significant growth in 2015. Apple, on the other hand, continues to be a strong and desirable brand in the eyes of the Chinese consumers,” said Tay Xiaohan, senior market analyst with IDC Asia/Pacific’s client devices team.
The Chinese smartphone market is actually slowing down now, and more or less every China-based smartphone OEM, and analysts as well, expect smartphone sales to stagnate in a way. We’ll see what happens by the end of this year, but nonetheless, we’ll see plenty of exciting tech in 2016.