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Smartphone Sales Growth Slows

With the PC market declining and the tablet market declining, the growing smartphone marker has been the one bright spot for mobile device makers (*), but now that light is dimming.

A new estimate from Gartner shows a slowdown in global smartphone sales growth. With 330 million smartphones sold last quarter, the market is still growing – just at the slowest rate since 2013.

gartner

Samsung continued to lead the pack even though it saw a decline in and managed to boost its sales numbers, but Apple, Xiaomi, and a several lesser smartphone makers saw their sales decline increase in the second quarter of 2015.

According to Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner, smartphones sales grew in many regions, just not China. " Emerging Asia/Pacific (excluding China), Eastern Europe and Middle East and Africa were the fastest-growing regions, driven by good performance from Chinese and local vendors," he said. "By contrast, smartphone sales in China fell for the first time year over year, recording a 4 percent decline."

Gupta attributed the decline to market saturation. China represented 30% of global smartphone sales last quarter, and sales declined because "China has reached saturation — its phone market is essentially driven by replacement, with fewer first-time buyers."

Later in the press release, Gartner broke out the sales by OS. With 82.2% of units sold, Android continued to dominate, followed by iPhones (14.6%), Windows (2.5%), and other OSes.

P.S. No, I’m not forgetting wearables. With sales estimated to be in the low millions in 2014, they don’t count for much.

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Comments


Tim F. August 20, 2015 um 2:42 pm

"Samsung continued to lead the pack and managed to boost its sales numbers, but Apple, Xiaomi, and a several lesser smartphone makers saw their sales decline in the second quarter of 2015."

You got that completely backwards. The column for 2Q15 is before the column for 2Q14.


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