Samsung and Xiaomi’s dominance of the smartphone market as far as Android OEMs are concerned means that their smartphones are objects of desire to quite a number of people who either can’t afford them despite there being Samsung and Xiaomi smartphones at almost every imaginable price point or people who aren’t keen enough to tell them apart when placed alongside knockoffs. As such, it comes as no surprise that the two brands account for the most faked smartphones in China, a country associated with just about everything that is fake.
Popular benchmarking application AnTuTu has gathered valuable data from the millions of devices that connect to its servers on a daily basis as they seek to know how they stack against the competition and it released that data. Out of a total of 10 million devices, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi takes a large share of the pie of regularly faked smartphone brands with 37.3% of fake smartphones being modeled along the company’s most popular and successful models like the MiNote, the Redmi Note and the Mi3. Samsung is the next most popular brand for clone-makers with the company’s popular smartphone models like the Galaxy Note 3 and Note 4 helping it inspire over 30% of the clones in the Chinese market.
Combined, Samsung and Xiaomi-inspired smartphone knockoffs account for close to 70% of all the non-genuine smartphones that hit AnTuTu’s servers. Huawei comes a distance third with the Shenzhen-based company managing to inspire just a little under 4% of the cloned devices. Besides Xiaomi and Huawei, other homegrown brands like Lenovo, Oppo, Coolpad and ZTE are also favoured by the people buying knockoffs in China.
The numbers released by AnTuTu are reflective of the popularity of the various brands in the market. While those that are currently in the lead as far as market share goes like Xiaomi and Samsung also happen to be the ones most likely to inspire counterfeiters, those whose fortunes have dipped in recent years like HTC also account for fewer wannabes.
With the Apple iPhone 6 being the first smartphone that was released in the Chinese market directly, we can be sure that the number of iPhone clones in that market is equally high. However, since Apple devices and benchmark apps like AnTuTu aren’t known to be buddies, that data is hard to get hold of.
