While global smartphone revenues remained flat year-over-year, Apple led the market with record Q3 revenue and revenue share, with the iPhone 15 positioned to do even better this quarter.
As smartphone markets all across the globe wither away, China saw only two manufacturers pick up any new growth so far in 2023 — and Apple is one of them.
Research claims that while the entire market's smartphone profits declined by around a tenth in 2019, Apple continued to dominate with 66% of all profits and the nearest competitor being Samsung on just 17%.
Apple's share of the global smartphone market fell year-over-year in the June quarter from 11.3% to 10.1%, attributable by a research firm mostly because of better performance by Chinese vendors and Korea's Samsung.
On Wednesday, major Chinese phone maker Oppo revealed an alternative to the smartphone display notches popularized by the iPhone X — what it's calling the Under-Screen Camera, or USC.
Apple saw the iPhone drop to 11.9% of the global smartphone market in the March quarter, even as Chinese rivals like Huawei bucked the industry's overall decline.
While some rivals appear set to launch hardware with support for nascent 5G wireless technology in 2019 at some point, Apple looks like it's going to wait another year before making an iPhone that can use them — like it did twice before.
The iPhone is doing quite well in China, having led the local smartphone market in revenue — though not units — during the first half of 2018, according to one research firm.
It's not news that Apple is grabbing all the profits in the smartphone industry. But new data shows that Apple's most expensive new iPhone flagships are accomplishing this largely on their own, indicating that analyst chatter about smartphone users really wanting cheaper devices is totally delusional.
The Chinese smartphone market was actually hit harder in the March quarter than a recent report suggested, dropping 21 percent year-over-year to 91 million units, according to a separate analysis.
For decades, market research firms have been confidently asserting that the "winners" in PCs, tablets, smartphones and other consumer electronics are not firms that are profitable or even sustainable, but merely those shipping the largest volumes at any given time. This has enabled them to crown a successive line of failed players, then rapidly move on to a new "winner," often within the same year. The bigger problem for this sort of flawgic is that the game itself is changing.
Last year, Samsung's exploding Galaxy Note 7 created a catastrophically distracting meltdown for the company that enabled Apple to surpass it in total unit sales of smartphones during the winter quarter. This year, Apple has again surpassed sales of all Samsung smartphones in the quarter, except this time it's by virtue of trend-bucking new demand for the innovative, revolutionary iPhone X—without much apparent regard for its price.
Supply chain reports from China suggest that Huawei, Oppo, and Xiaomi are looking at alternatives to OLED, as Apple grows the quantity of screens it needs for the iPhone.
Looking to keep up with the competition from Apple's iPhone X, a number of Android smartphone makers are expected to adopt 3D sensors for products launching in 2018.
Android smartphone manufacturers are looking towards developing more foldable phones to offer consumers a larger display to compete against bigger handsets like the iPhone 8 Plus, a report claims, with a number of vendors said to be working on mobile devices using multiple screens to create a larger display area.
Apple's iPhone X — the first iPhone with a "TrueDepth" camera — may not be the only smartphone suffering from problems with 3D sensor production, as shipments for competing products are also reportedly being delayed.
Young smartphone buyers in China are preferring to buy low-priced domestic brands over phones from Samsung, but the loyalty rate in buying another Oppo or Vivo phone is half that of buyers getting another iPhone— which remains the largest installed smartphone base in China.
Low-end Chinese phones from companies that barely turn a profit and sell their cheaper products outside of urban centers are growing fast, but, Apple has an 80 percent lock on premium phone sales in China that isn't weakening. That's fueling Services and driving buyers into Apple Stores for other premium gear.
Possibly offering a peek into Apple's March-quarter results due to be revealed May 2, data released on Thursday estimated that Apple shipped some 51.6 million iPhones during the period, a slight improvement over 51.2 million a year prior.
The launch of Samsung's 2017 flagship Galaxy S8 isn't causing any apparent concern among Apple's investors, who collectively pushed the company's stock even further upward today despite the announcements—and the continuous run up in Apple stock that has occurred since the iPhone maker last released earnings in January.
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Peter Cohen
Evan Selleck
William Gallagher
Roger Fingas
Daniel Eran Dilger
Mike Wuerthele
Malcolm Owen
