Smartphone Shipments Hit Record High in 2015: IDC

As per IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report, Samsung remains the undisputed leader of the smartphone market, with 324.8 million handsets shipped in 2015 and 85.6 million in the last quarter. In Huawei’s case, this resulted in 32.4 million units shipped in Q4, a market share of 8.1-percent and a year-over-year growth of 37-percent.

Despite a record year, smartphone shipments actually declined to 117.9 million in the last quarter, down 4 percent from the same period in 2014. This helped the company become the fourth mobile phone maker to ship more than 100 million units in a year, joining Apple, Samsung and Nokia.

Total smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter grew just 6% to 404.5 million units from 380.1 million units in Q4 2014.

The three Chinese companies together accounted for 17.5% of the global smartphone market in 2015.

Apple hit a new high with 74.8 million units shipped, albeit just 0.3 million more than the same quarter one year ago.

Xiaomi, another Chinese manufacturer in the top five, dominated mostly in its hometown, China, despite launching in new markets like India, Brazil and South Africa. Continued demand for Apple’s iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, particularly in China and the US, elevated Apple in 2015 to 231.5 million units shipped in the year.

Despite record results for 2015, the future may not be a good one for smartphone manufacturers, as market research form Gartner expects shipments of smartphones to increase by only 2.6 percent this year with falling revenues.

Today Strategy Analytics has released new data showing how Apple’s last two years of shipments compare to competitors like Samsung and Huawei.

Right behind it was Lenovo, which bought what was left of the Motorola business from Google along with its own home-grown phones. Remarkably for the Cupertino based tech giant, its China growth of 18% was made up of 50% first time iPhone users, proving that maybe it is developing markets where it should be focusing. Xiaomi shipped 18.2 million devices.

Linda Sui, Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Vivo held on to fourth position with 10 percent smartphone marketshare in China during Q4 2015, while its shipment growth rate expanded a healthy 20 percent annually”.

Lenovo is now the world’s number four mobile phone vendor regarding shipments, with 20.2 million units in Q4 and around 74 million units in 2015.

Chau, while alluding to China’s current economic woes, said Huawei grew its smartphone shipments by selling to other outside of China and in the process saw it retain its 3 position.