Slowing China Device Sales Dent Overall Market as Apple Picks Up Share

China is by far the largest single territory for sales (of the eight territories GfK uses) with 88.7m sales worth collectively $26.8bn, although unit sales fell 10 per cent year-on-year.

Notably, China is driving the majority of smartphone sales in 2015, making up 30 percent of sales this quarter but Gartner notes that China has “reached saturation” and is to blame for overall sales slowing. “

Its poor performance negatively affected the performance of the mobile phone market in the second quarter”,

Gupta said. The research firm didn’t say why China’s unit sales were down, but noted that its revenue jumped 17 percent, reflecting the market’s increasing desire to buy fewer, but pricier, smartphones.

THE GALAXY S6 hasn’t done Samsung many favours, according to new figures from Gartner, as the company continues to lose market share as it fails to challenge rivals Apple and Huawei.

Still, Apple Inc’s share of the worldwide smartphone sales market rose to 14.6 percent from 12.2 percent a year earlier.

With smartphone sales dipping across global markets, especially in China where sales have stagnated, Apple has done well to register a growth where Samsung, Blackberry and Microsoft failed.

Android saw its lowest year-over-year growth of 11 per cent, with its market share reaching 82.2 per cent in the second quarter of 2015.

China’s smartphone sales zoomed over the last two years, as many people traded in their older feature phones for newer models with big touchscreens suited to functions like game playing, web surfing and online reading. By comparison, in China, where the trend is particularly pronounced, the growth in share to 57 percent – from 32 percent in Q1 2014 – was driven by cheaper large screen models flooding into the market. Meanwhile, smartphone vendors raked in the cash, generating $92.4 billion during the second quarter, up from $86 billion during the same period in 2014.

According to the Germany-headquartered market research company, 4G smartphones now capture 6 per cent of the smartphone unit demand in India.

It paints an even more contentious picture for the third-place mobile operating system, Windows Phone, which was only able to grab just 2.6 percent of sales overall last quarter. Huawei, ZTE, TCL Communication and Micromax, benefited from high demand in emerging markets, while vendors such as Sony, Samsung and HTC struggled to achieve growth at the high end of the market.

In Q1 2015, 4G unit share surpassed 50 percent of global smartphone demand for the first time.