Samsung has finally lost its number one position in the global smartphone market to Apple. According to the latest report by International Data Corporation (IDC), Apple now has a market share of 19.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017, while Samsung has a market share of 18.4 percent.
IDC says that smartphone industry has seen a decline of 6.3 percent in smartphone shipment when compared to the Q4 of 2016. Smartphone vendors shipped a total of 403.5 million units during the fourth quarter of 2017. For the full year, the worldwide smartphone market saw a total of 1.472 billion units shipped, declining less than 1 percent from the 1.473 billion units shipped in 2016.
Apple has experienced a year-over-year decline of 1.3 percent as compared to previous holiday quarter. The report says that 77.3 million units of iPhones were shipped in Q4 of 2017. However, the volumes were still enough to push Apple past Samsung and the main reason was the launch of iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X. However, the report notes that iPhone X did not receive strong response as many expected. Apple finished second for the full year in 2017 shipping 215.8 million units, up 0.2% from the 215.4 million units shipped in 2016.
Coming to Samsung, it still remains the overall leader in the worldwide smartphone market for 2017 despite losing out to Apple in the fourth quarter. The Korean giant shipped 74.1 million units in 4Q17, down 4.4 percent compared to the 77.5 million units from last year. Samsung finished the year with 317.3 million shipments, up 1.9 percent from the 311.4 million shipments in 2016.
Moving on, Huawei grabbed the third position with a market share of 10.2 percent in the Q4 of 2017. Huawei shipped 41.0 million units, down 9.7 percent from the 45.4 million shipped in the fourth quarter of 2016. The 2017 results look much better for the Chinese giant as the Honor brand helped pushed sales both inside and outside of China. Huawei shipped 153.1 million units, up 9.9 percent from the 139.3 million unit shipped in 2016.
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Xiaomi took the fourth position in the global smartphone market with a share of 7.3 percent. The company managed to double its share from 3.3 percent to 7 percent. The company has continued to focus on growth outside China, with India and Russia being two of its largest markets.
Lastly, Oppo grabbed the last position with a global market share of 6.8 percent. The company shipped 27.4 million smartphones while managing to maintain 12 percent growth for the full year, amounting to 111.8 million smartphones.