ALMOST one in five people in the world now use a smart phone.
The latest figures from market tracker IDC shows that smart phone vendors shipped a total of 1.43 billion units in 2015, 10 percent more than the 1.3 billion units sold in 2014.
While Samsung led once again in units sold (324.8 million), its market share slipped to 22.7 percent in 2015, down from 24.4 percent, despite a 2.1 percent increase in sales. The data indicates that the Korean company lost some of this share to Chinese manufacturers, who posted significant gains last year.
With iPhone sales rising 20 percent during the year, Apple was the second largest smart phone vendor in 2015, shipping 231.5 million units, and accounting for 16.2 percent of the marketóup from 14.8 percent in 2014.
The next three top spots went to Chinese companies, with Huawei posting an impressive growth of 44.3 percent with 106.6 million units shipped in 2015. This gave the company a 7.4 percent of the market, a strong gain from 5.7 percent in 2014. The company also became the fourth (preceded only by Nokia, Samsung and Apple) to ship more than 100 million smart phones in a year.
Usually the conversation in the smartphone market revolves around Samsung and Apple, but Huawei’s strong showing for both the quarter and the year speak to how much it has grown as an international brand,” said Melissa Chau, senior research manager with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.
With almost half of its shipments going outside China, Huawei is poised to be a strong No. 3 over the next year, Chau added.
In fourth place was Lenovo, with 74 million units shipped, a strong 24.5 percent growth from 2014. This gave Lenovo a 5.2 percent market share in 2015, up from 4.6 percent in the previous year.
Rounding out the top five was Xiaomi, which shipped 70.8 million smart phones in 2015, up 22.8 percent from 2014. This gave the company a 4.9 percent market share, up from 4.4 percent in 2014.
The top five vendors accounted for more than half of all smart phones sold in 2015. Other companies, which shipped a combined 625.2 million units, accounted for 43. 6 percent, the IDC figures showed.
While IDC has yet to release shipment data based on operating systems, it is easy to conclude that Android from Google continued to dominate the market in 2015, with Apple’s iOS coming in second.
The absence of any Windows Phone manufacturers among the top five shows that the operating system from Microsoft continued to languish in 2015, despite its purchase of Nokia in 2014.
Windows Phone’s poor market performance is a far cry from the bold (and now embarrassing) prediction by IDC in 2011 that Microsoft’s mobile operating system would surpass Apple’s iOS by 2016. Of course, that prediction wrongly assumed that users on Nokia’s Symbian OS would merely shift to Windows Phone along with the Finnish company.
To be fair, another market watcher, Gartner, also had a similar prediction in 2011óand both companies expected Blackberry in fourth place. Which all goes to show that market projections can be a really tricky business, particularly amid rapid technology changes and the unpredictable buying preferences of consumers.
Also, the year-end figures reveal a different picture for Apple when they are broken down by quarter. Apple, in fact, has reported that its fourth quarter sales of the iPhoneówhich accounts for about two-thirds of the company’s revenue–grew at less than 1 percent over the same period in 2014óthe slowest pace since its introduction in 2007. Whether that portends the end of Apple’s years of hyper growth, as some analysts think, or whether it is just a statistical result caused by the wildly successful iPhone 6 in 2014 remains to be seen. Predictions are tricky going both ways. Chin Wong
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