“Apple’s iPhone sales fared better in the quarter than most smartphone vendors in the market and also grew sales quarter-over-quarter,” said Annette Zimmermann, research vice president at Gartner. The return to normalcy in China seems to have helped the iPhone maker. “The improved business environment in China helped Apple achieve growth in the country. In addition, the introduction of the new iPhone SE encouraged users of older phones upgrade their smartphones.”
With marketshare of 13%, Apple stood at No. 3 position among the top 5 biggest smartphone brands globally. Out of these top 5, three companies: Samsung, Xiaomi and Oppo saw their sales go down in double-digits. Samsung, though stood at No. 1 position worldwide, recorded largest decline among these top five global smartphone vendors. The company sold nearly 55 million smartphones in the second quarter of 2020, witnessing a decline of 27.1% year on year.
As per the report, Xiaomi saw second-biggest fall. The company’s global smartphone sales declined by 21.5% year-over-year, followed by Oppo that saw a plaunge of 15.9%. The second-biggest smartphone vendor by sales, Huawei saw sales dip by 6.8%.
Overall, the global smartphone market sales stood at 295 million units in the second quarter of 2020. Almost all major markets, except China, continued to face some form of shelter-in-place restrictions for most of the second quarter of 2020 which led to continued declining smartphone demand. “The improved situation in China saw demand recovering quarter- over-quarter,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. “Travel restrictions, retail closures and more prudent spending on nonessential products during the pandemic led to the second consecutive quarterly decline in smartphone sales this year.”
Even with increased demand, smartphone sales in China declined 7% in the second quarter of 2020, with nearly 94 million smartphones sold. India which adopted rigorous lockdowns (even restricting e-commerce) recorded the worst smartphone sales decline (-46%) among the top five countries in the world.
