Smartphone sales estimates for the second quarter of 2019 are out and the numbers are not looking good for Apple. The company recently stopped reporting their iPhone sales numbers, leaving analysts to estimate the number of iPhones sold every quarter.
According to IHS Markit, an insights and analytics firm, Apple’s market share has been shrinking and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. IHS notes that, between April and June 2019, Apple sold around 35.3 million iPhones, a 14.6% decline from the same period in 2019.
This decline is recorded as the only one among the top five smartphone vendors in Q2 2019. The list puts Samsung, Huawei and OPPO ahead of Apple. This is in contrary to other market analysts, Strategy Analytics and Counterpoint Research, who rank Apple as the third best selling smartphone vendor behind Samsung and Huawei.
In terms of market share, Strategy Analytics reports that Apple possessed an 11.1% share in Q2 2019, Counterpoint reports that Apple’s share was 10.1% while IHS reports a share of 11%. As can be seen, all these numbers lie in the same ballpark, thus we can confidently conclude that indeed the iPhone’s market share is shrinking.
However, that’s not the entire story. See, traditionally, Apple’s iPhone sales have always been low in the second quarter of the year as customers wait out to buy the new phones coming out at the end of Q3. For the other brands, Samsung and Huawei in specific, they already announced their first flagships of the year and numerous budget devices that have pushed their sales.
In as much as it is impressive that there’s a possibility that OPPO sold more phones than Apple, the truth is that OPPO’s victory will not be long-lived as the real muscle of iPhone sales is felt in coming quarters.
Comments