14 DAY TRIAL // Things are going from bad to worse for Apple, and after the company revealed dropping sales for the iPhone lineup, Cupertino is now losing the leading position in the United States in a ranking of top phone manufacturers in the country.
Research conducted by Hong Kong-based firm Counterpoint Research shows that Samsung devices accounted for a total of 28.8 percent of all phones sold in the United Sates in March, enough to make the company the leader in the country.
Apple has been the top company in these charts since April 2015, but the declining sales of the iPhone, coupled with a boom in sales experienced by the new Samsung Galaxy S7, allowed the South Korean firm to take over the leading spot.
Apple is currently on the second position with 23 percent market share while LG takes the third place with 17.1 percent. Given the fact that sales of the iPhone aren’t yet showing any signs of recovery, Apple could continue losing ground in the coming months, thus allowing LG to get even close and fight for the second place.
Could the iPhone 7 save Apple?
What’s worse for Apple is that the company isn’t planning to introduce any new device until September this year, so the drop could deepen in the coming months.
The iPhone 7 is indeed projected to launch in the fall, but until now, leaks and information that have reached the web via unofficial channels have pointed to rather minor changes and a design similar to the iPhone 6s. If this is the case, the iPhone 7 might fail in its mission to boost iPhone sales, thus pushing the company into an unprecedented crisis that it has never experienced.
If there’s a good thing for Apple in these statistics, it is the rather disappointing performance of Chinese companies, which would otherwise become strong competitors to the iPhone maker. Huawei reached only a 1 percent market share in the United States while ZTE actually performed a little bit better and gained 6.6 percent.