Apple Inc and Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp (歐珀) were the top smartphone makers in China in the first quarter this year, in a market that is still shrinking following a year of economic disruptions.
Shenzhen-based Oppo had the biggest share of shipments, at 19.6 percent, IDC data showed, with Apple’s iPhone following close behind.
Counterpoint and Canalys estimates, which look at sales and shipments, handed Apple the narrow lead.
Photo: Bloomberg
The US electronics firm clinched the top spot in the final three months of last year following the release of its iPhone 14 and 14 Pro series.
The Chinese smartphone market registered double-digit contractions for most of the past year, first with steep drops in sales of Android handsets, such as those made by Oppo, and eventually affecting even Apple’s iPhone range.
Shipments to China excluding Hong Kong and Macau declined 11 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier to the lowest first-quarter levels in a decade, Canalys said.
Price cuts of iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max models helped in February, IDC said, although the introduction of a new yellow iPhone 14 handset failed to stir major excitement.
Apple debuted the new color option early last month hoping to keep buyers interested in the pricey device, which costs at least 5,999 yuan (US$866) in China.
Oppo sold more premium devices than expected in the past quarter, IDC said.
It got a boost from its sub-brand OnePlus returning to the domestic market, along with a positive reception to its foldable devices.
Samsung Electronics Co, the global leader in smartphones and foldables, has only a small presence in China, where every local phone maker now has at least one foldable model on sale.
None of the top five biggest vendors in China recorded positive growth.
Vivo, Honor Mobile (榮耀) and Xiaomi Corp (小米) rounded out the leading brands, each with significant declines on the same period last year.
Smartphone production is down 13.8 percent in the world’s second-largest economy this year, despite a rebound in the overall economy, official data showed.
“The [COVID-19] pandemic affected consumer behavior in the medium to long term, where consumers tended to spend their income on necessities and maintain certain savings,” Canalys analyst Lucas Zhong said in a report yesterday. “Vendors need to offer convincing products to stimulate upgrades.”
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
RSS