The smartphone market at the moment is saturated and with the arrival of more Chinese OEMs, customers are starting to realize that in order to get a good smartphone, they don’t necessarily have to fork out $600-$700 for one. Instead we’re seeing companies like OnePlus, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Huawei offer up competing handsets for much less.
So much so that it really doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that the market share of some OEMs have taken a beating as a result of this. In fact Samsung’s market share for smartphones seems to have fallen to its lowest level in the past 2 years, at least that’s according to the data from IDC.
According to IDC, Samsung’s market share has fallen to 20% in Q3 of 2016. This is a drop of 3.3% from its previous year’s market share, although it seems that despite that the company is still leading in terms of market shipments with 72.5 million. Apple is also no stranger to the decline and saw their market share drop from 13.4% last year to 12.5%.
Now like we said, Chinese OEMs are on the rise because companies like Huawei saw their market share rise from 7.6% last year to 9.3%, and Oppo saw theirs leap from 3.2% in the previous year to 7% this year. That being said, both companies are still quite a ways from Apple and Samsung’s market share, but at the rate things are going, we wouldn’t be surprised if they were to catch up soon.