Apple had a phenomenal Q4 2020 where they managed to sell more phones than first time in a while than Samsung.
According to IDC, Apple shipped 90.1 million smartphones taking first place in Q4 2020. This represented 23.4% of the total market share and 22.2% year on year growth. Apple’s strong showing was of particular interest to me. Yesterday, they announced that they had their best quarter ever with $111.4 billion in revenue of which $65.5 billion was from iPhones. Q4 is the holiday season and Apple usually posts great numbers during this quarter.
Samsung fell to second place with 73.9 million devices shipped which translated to a 19.1% market share and a year on year growth of 6.2%.Xiaomi was third with 43.3 million devices shipped. Surprisingly, OPPO was fourth with 33.8 million devices shipped. They both grew on the decline of Huawei with an increase of 32% and 10.7% respectively.
Speaking of Huawei, they sadly fell to 5th place with 32.3 million shipped which was a massive year over year decline of 42.4%. They continue to suffer from the US sanctions placed on them between 2019 and 2020. This has led to their competitors scooping their market share over time.
IDC report says that in Q4 2020, there was a 4.3% year on year growth with smartphone vendors shipping a total of 385.9 million devices. Although the full year 2020 shipments declined 5.9% compared to 2019, they say that the progress towards market recovery has been impressive and they expect the momentum heading to 2021 will remain strong.
“There are a lot of elements at play that are fueling the smartphone market recovery – pent-up demand, continued supply push on 5G, aggressive promotions, and the popularity of low to mid-priced phones,” said Nabila Popal, research director with IDC said.
