Xiaomi Trumps Apple in Q3 2020 Global Sales, Samsung Leads: Gartner

Global smartphone sales seemed to have improved in the third quarter of 2020 after seeing a slump in the early months of the year, according to the latest findings from research firm Gartner. Samsung saw the most sales to end users, with 80.8 million units in this period. It enjoyed a healthy 22 percent market share in the third quarter, followed by Huawei, who has taken the second spot, but is seeing a year-on-year decline in sales. Its third quarter sales for 2020 were 51.8 million units, down from 65.8 million units last year.

Gartner has released its global smartphone sales figures for Q3 2020, which showed that while Samsung kept the top spot with 80.8 million units sold, its growth was only 2.2 percent over the previous year. As mentioned, Huawei saw a slight decline compared to last year, but Xiaomi grew its share from 8.5 percent in 2019 to 12.1 percent this year, taking the third spot from Apple, selling 44.4 million units against 2019's 32.9 million units.

Huawei, despite some contraction, still holds 14.1 percent market share, but it is lower than 16.9 percent market share last year. Its annual growth saw a significant decline of 21.3 percent. Apple takes the fourth position in global smartphone sales figures with 40.5 million units in Q3 2020 and market share of 11.1 percent. It saw an annual decline of 0.6 percent.

Oppo becomes a part of the top five OEMs to achieve the highest smartphone sales globally. It sells over 29.8 million units in Q3 2020 raking in a market share of 8.2 percent. Its annual growth also saw a decline of -2.3 percent.

Gartner says that worldwide smartphone sales to end-users totalled 366 million units in the third quarter of 2020, down 5.7 percent from the third quarter of 2019. Overall global mobile phone sales to end users totalled 401 million units, a decline of 8.7 percent year-over-year. The research firm says that quarterly smartphone sales saw a slump in the early quarters of 2020 due to the COVID-19 crisis. However, a sequential recovery is noticed in third quarter.

“Early signs of recovery can be seen in a few markets, including parts of mature Asia/Pacific and Latin America. Near normal conditions in China improved smartphone production to fill in the supply gap in the third quarter which benefited sales to some extent. For the first time this year, smartphone sales to end users in three of the top five markets i.e., India, Indonesia and Brazil increased, growing 9.3 percent, 8.5 percent, and 3.3 percent, respectively,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner.

Is this the end of the Samsung Galaxy Note series as we know it? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.