New data shows the company sold 259 million devices

Feb 8, 2023 06:14 GMT  ·  By

2022 was a pretty challenging year when it comes to the phone industry, as sales went down for pretty much every single company out there.

Samsung, for example, went down 4.8 percent year over year, but despite this significant drop, it remains the world’s number one phone market.

This is thanks to selling 259 million units in 2022, some 28 million more phones than rival Apple.

The South Koreans secured a market share of 21 percent, but with 19 percent, Apple is pretty close and could potentially overtake its rival in 2023.

Apple’s drop in 2022 was only 1.3 percent.

With a little over 1.2 billion sold phones, the market fell 9.9 percent from the previous year, and companies like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo recorded massive declines that exceeded 20 percent.

“Over 2022, there were 1,207 million recorded shipments. This is a fall of 9.9% from the 1,340 million shipments recorded in 2021. Honor was the only major set OEM to see growth over YoY, having recorded 59 million in 2022 compared to 40 million in 2021. Apple and Motorola were the two OEMs most resilient to the general trend of decline, each seeing small falls of 1.3% and 1.4% respectively. Samsung’s final recorded shipments in 2022 are 259 million, the most of any OEM, but this is still a 4.8% fall from the 272 million recorded in 2021. Those most hit were the Chinese set OEMs, with Xiaomi, vivo and Oppo group all seeing significant double-digit falls in shipments YoY,” Omdia explains.

2023 will continue to be difficult, especially at least until the third quarter, the company says. As such, Apple could be the one to benefit from this expected recovery, especially because this is when the company is projected to take the wraps off its new-generation iPhones.