It’s raining smartphone sales figures in China. Xiaomi is top among those making it rain. This is bad for the incumbents like LG and Samsung. It’s the turn of LG to feel the heat. This is after Strategy Analytics reported that Xiaomi recently edited the list of top 5 global smartphone vendors. Out goes Lg, in comes Xiaomi. According to Forbes quoting a Q2 figures report that cannot be found online so far, Strategy Analytics reports 27% smartphone shipments growth. This is a 295 million unit figure with Android taking the lion’s share at 85% of the shipments.
Now Samsung still leads the pack even here with 25.2% of the smartphone shipments. Apple scores half that with 11.9%, Huawei with 6.8% and Lenovo with 5.4%. The new entrant Xiaomi scores 5.1% in marketshare, quite close to Lenovo with 0.3 percentage points difference. What’s worth worrying about foe all the players is that Xiaomi is just 4 years old and is doing 5% globally, something even Microsoft with all the Redmond money has not been able to pull.
Xiaomi shipped 15.1 million units and isn’t even shipping globally, currently only recently went out of China and to India where it’s also doing very well. Capturing big markets like those is quite a scare for traditional vendors who have relied on the same markets for massive sales units. Xiaomi is eating someone’s lunch already.
IDC on the other hand, in their report also published this week doesn’t have Xiaomi as top 5 and instead has LG at 4.9%, Lenovo at 5.4% and Huawei at 6.9% with the other two market leaders having the same figure. The smartphone total shipments is the same in both reports at 295 million units. In IDC’s case however, there has been growth in the “others” category where Xiaomi would otherwise be placed and this figure lies at 45.8% up from 38.7% same quarter last year.
