14 DAY TRIAL // We recently reported that Apple smartphones increased their share across most markets during the first quarter of this year and a new study by Strategy Analytics confirms previous reports and reveals that the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus were the world’s most popular smartphones during Q1.
Specifically, the iPhone 7 managed to record shipments of 21.5 million worldwide, while the iPhone 7 Plus was slightly less popular, with sales reaching 17.4 million. Surprisingly, Samsung smartphones don’t adorn the third position in the chart, which is occupied by Chinese smartphone maker Oppo and its R9s phone with 8.9 million shipments.
Chinese smartphone makers are quite popular in their home country, surpassing Apple and Samsung by a large margin. Samsung currently struggles on the sixth position in China’s smartphone market, but the Korean company directly competes against Apple for the top spot in other countries.
Samsung’s Galaxy J mid-rangers fall on the fourth and fifth spots
Samsung’s Galaxy J3 (2016) and Galaxy J5 (2016) reach the fourth and fifth position in the global smartphone shipments chart, with 6.1 million and 5.0 million units, respectively. Other brands combined managed to record 294.4 million smartphone shipments during the first quarter of this year.
Apple actually managed to sell 50.8 million iPhones last quarter, but the company didn’t actually reveal the numbers for each model, even though sales slightly decreased. Still, the research firm believes iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus models accounted for 76.5% of Apple’s sales of smartphones last quarter, with the standard model being more popular than the larger screen one.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook did recently say that the iPhone 7 Plus was in such high demand that Apple had a difficult time building enough units. Thus, if enough units had been available, the iPhone 7 Plus could have been able to outsell the standard model. The market dynamic is expected to change in the following quarters, as Apple is gearing up to announce new iPhones, and Samsung sales of the Galaxy S8 will be taken into account.
