14 DAY TRIAL // Research and advisory firm Gartner has just released a report on smartphone sales and mobile OS market share for Q4 2016. The report shows a major shift in the market - Apple has become the top global smartphone vendor after 8 quarters.
The last time Apple held this position was in Q4 2014, when its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus managed to generate massive sales for the company. It seems that the latest iPhone 7 and 7 Plus were the flagships that drove Apple’s market share up to 17.9%, compared to Samsung’s 17.8% in Q4 last year.
Apple’s phones saw high demand in most mature markets like Korea, North America and Western Europe, where sales of Samsung devices were greatly affected by the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco. Apple managed to sell by just 256,000 units more than Samsung and it would be interesting to see if the Cupertino company will hold its leading position in this year’s last quarter after both companies will have launched new flagships.
Android OS still holds more than 80% of the market
432 million smartphones were sold globally in Q4 2016, 7% more compared to the same quarter of 2015. For the whole year 2016, 1.5 billion phones were sold to end users, up 5% compared to the previous year. Samsung still sold more phones during the whole 2016 year compared to Apple, but the company has started to face some difficulties.
Samsung sales started to drop in the third quarter and continued their decline to an 8% rate in the fourth, while its market share dropped by 2.9% year-on-year. In the premium segment, Samsung was greatly affected by the discontinuation of its Galaxy Note 7 flagship, while mid-range and entry-level Samsung phones saw fierce competition from Huawei, Oppo and BlackBerry, which holds the fifth position globally.
When it comes to mobile operating systems, Google’s Android held 82% of the market in Q4 2016, while its share grew by 3.2% to 84.8% during last year. It was the only mobile OS to grow its market share year-on-year. Apple’s iOS is second on the market with 17.9% in the last quarter of 2016, Windows is third with 0.3%, while BlackBerry’s OS dropped 0.2% to 0.0% of the market in Q4 2016.