Roger Fingas
Apple continued losing ground in the Chinese smartphone market in May, seeing its share drop to fifth place amid tough local competition, according to research data published on Wednesday.
The iPhone's marketshare fell to 10.8 percent from 12 percent a year prior, Counterpoint Research told Bloomberg. The top four smartphone makers — controlling 53 percent of the market — were all local companies, namely Huawei, Vivo, Oppo, and Xiaomi.
Huawei in fact improved its lead to 17.3 percent, while Oppo grew rapidly, almost doubling its share year-over-year to 11 percent.
Although Apple has identified China as an important market, one potentially poised to eclipse the United States, the company saw overall sales in the "Greater China" region — including Hong Kong and Taiwan — drop 26 percent year-over-year in the March quarter.
June-quarter results are set to be announced on July 26, and are likely to contain more bad news about China. The company is guiding to between $41 billion and $43 billion in global revenues, a substantial fall from the $49.6 billion achieved in Q3 2015.
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20 Comments
If Apple's percentage dropped that little, then it just means the entire market for these phones in China is expanding rapidly.
Why do I get the feeling they are comparing the market share of phone brands and not actual market share of similar products? Many smartphones have become so cheap now they can literally be made for less than a feature phone used to be. While cheaper phones can and do compete with premium phones for customers, these reports would be more valuable if they showed exactly what product classes were growing and contracting. I'm actually more interested in the actual number off phones each vendor sells rather than their percentage of some hypothetical market. If a company sells 50M phones this year and has 12% and 60M next year and has only 10% then I don't really see the problem.
I guess maybe this is why Apple put some much emphasis on emojis and special effects in the new iMessage? I hear the Chinese love using these.
I know China is a large market but in the end, is it really worth it? Apple catches so much crap from China with these stupid laws and lawsuits and the government makes them do all kinds of things other countries don't, etc. Is it really worth the trouble in the end? I'm sure it is millions of phones, but I wonder how much compared to other countries.
Apple is profitable. Are those Chinese cell phone manufacturers are profitable as well or they bleeding borrowed money to gain market share? Just curious...