Chinese smartphone market is still the largest smartphone market in the world. India has been growing at an incredible pace for quite some time now, but it’s still not close to China. This Asian country is home to a ton of smartphone manufacturing companies, which produce a significant number of devices every year. Huawei has actually managed to sell around 109 million smartphones globally last year, while Xiaomi hit the 70 million number. Oppo has shipped out 50 million devices, while Meizu managed to sell 20 million units.
That being said, these are global numbers, and Strategy Analytics released some China-only sales number recently. According to the market analysts, Chinese smartphone shipments grew 3 percent annually, and have hit a record of 438 million shipped units in 2015. Xiaomi has managed to maintain the number one spot in China last year, with 17.5 million shipped smartphones, and 15% market share in Q4 2015. This means that Xiaomi’s shipments grew 11% annually. Huawei has shipped 17.9 million smartphones in Q4 2015, and has actually managed to top Xiaomi in that aspect last quarter. Now, as far as yearly shipments go, Strategy Analytics says that Xiaomi shipped 67.5 million units in China, and Huawei managed to sell 62.2 million devices. So, as you can see, Xiaomi is still the number one smartphone OEM in China, though Huawei si not that far behind. Things are significantly different when we look at global shipments, as I’ve mentioned earlier in this article.
Now, if we take a look at results of other companies in 2015, we’ll get to see that Apple actually took the 3rd place by shipping 49.5 million iPhone units, and the Cupertino giant is followed by Vivo and Oppo who managed to sell 36.7 and 33.2 million devices, respectively. Now, as far as market share goes, Xiaomi is also in the lead, and is followed by Huawei, Apple, Vivo and Oppo. Xiaomi holds 15.4% of the market, while the rest of the companies hold 14.2%, 11.3%, 8.4%, and 7.6%, respectively. It’s a toss-up between Xiaomi and Huawei in China it seems, and it will surely going to be interesting to see what happens this year. Huawei has managed to grow immensely in 2015, and has become world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer. Xiaomi is planning to expand to a number of global markets this year, at least according to reports, so we’ll see what happens.