It has been reported by CCS Insight that the global mobile phone market in the third quarter of 2016 has declined by 1.8% from the previous year to 481 million units. CCS Insight is a firm which offers a range of services including information regarding market forecasts for mobile phones, smart wearables, telecommunication carriers and multiplay services. Smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2016 has been reported to have seen an increase of 5.1% from the previous quarter while sales of non-smartphone products fell by 17% in the third quarter.
The drop in smartphone shipments has been blamed on weakness in developed markets where consumers are now less excited about the latest smartphones. This was aggravated by the difficult market conditions in emerging regions such as Latin America. However, the demand for smartphones in China is recovering after very weak demand in 2015. Growth of the demand for smartphones was also stronger compared to the first two quarters of the year and this was expected after component manufacturers pointed out that the second half of the year would be better than the first, when the transition from non-smartphones to smartphones would regain momentum. When it comes to manufacturers who shipped the most number of smartphones in the third quarter, Samsung maintained its lead, due to strong sales of its Samsung Galaxy S7 devices. The South Korean smartphone manufacturer shipped 76 million smartphones in the quarter, though it did record a 10% drop in smartphone shipments compared to last year. Surprisingly, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 crisis didn’t dramatically affect the company’s total shipments. CCS stated that this was because Samsung only sold about 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7 units before cancelling the product which accounted for 3% of smartphone shipments for the quarter.
In second place is Apple, though iPhone shipments fell 5% compared to the same quarter of 2015. CCS expects Apple to experience year-on-year growth in the current quarter of the year as current iPhone owners replace their older smartphones. Huawei is ranked third and happens to have had the most positive third quarter among the manufacturers, having had its smartphone shipments grow by 23% year-on-year and maintains a market share of close to 10%. OPPO and Vivo, both of which hail from China, continue to experience growing sales and are expanding their market share, mainly due to their strong performance in China.