The global smartphone market has momentum going into the year-end holiday shopping season, preliminary figures released on Thursday by International Data Corp (IDC) showed.
About 373.1 million smartphones were shipped worldwide during the third quarter of this year in a 2.7 percent rise from the same period last year, IDC said in a statement.
While IDC analysts considered the growth low, they saw it as a sign “the industry still has momentum.”
“Collectively, the industry continues to grow, but at a much slower pace than past years,” said Ryan Reith, a vice president with the global market intelligence firm. “What is clear is that the ‘others’ outside of the top five leading vendors continue to struggle and the industry leaders are quickly forming two camps.”
Reith depicted those camps as those driving high-volume sales — Apple Inc, Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Samsung Electronics Co — and a few Chinese smartphone makers finding traction outside that country.
The five top smartphone makers all shipped more units than they did in the same quarter last year, IDC said.
South Korean smartphone titan Samsung remained the overall leader, shipping 83.3 million handsets in a 9.5 percent increase from the same quarter last year, IDC said.
Apple’s new iPhone 8 models helped its third-quarter shipments climb 2.6 percent to 46.7 million, while China-based Huawei shipped 39.1 million smartphones in a “healthy” increase of 16.1 percent from a year earlier, IDC said.
China-based Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp (歐珀) ranked fourth with shipments, climbing 19 percent to 30.7 million compared with the same quarter last year, IDC said.
China’s Xiaomi Corp (小米) was in fifth place, but had the strongest gain, doubling its sales to 27.6 million units, driven mainly by success in India, the report said.
“The fourth quarter will be extremely competitive as vendors will fight it out to win over holiday shoppers,” IDC research manager Anthony Scarsella said.
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