Global sales of smartphones to end users rose 6.7% year over year to 366.2 million units in the second quarter of 2017, according to the latest analysis from Gartner.
Samsung remains the largest player with broadly similar market shares between Q217 and Q216; 22.5% and 22.4% respectively. The Korean giant shipped 82.5 billion phones in the most recent quarter, ahead of Apple (44.3bn, 12.1% share), and Huawei (35.9bn, 9.8% share).
Market shares did not particularly boom or bust year on year; Apple’s dropped from 12.9% to 12.1%, while Oppo and Vivo, who secured fourth and fifth position respectively, saw their shares go up 1.8% and 2.5%.
Looking deeper into the results, greater China, as well as emerging Asia/Pacific markets were the two largest contributors to smartphone sales. Greater China again broke 100 billion units sold (101.5bn), compared to emerging Asia Pacific regions at 78.2bn. The former’s market share in Q216 was 33.3%, with 114.2bn sales. A noticeable gap appears for the more mature markets of North America (40.4bn) and Western Europe (35.8bn).
Despite its still huge numbers, Gartner puts the yearly drop in greater China down to longer replacement cycles and users wishing to buy better smartphones. The company added that larger vendors continued to strengthen their positions while smaller brands lost ground.
According to Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner, a shortage of flash memory and OLED displays will affect premium smartphone supply as the year moves towards its end. “We’ve already seen Huawei’s P10 suffer from a flash memory shortage, and smaller, traditional brands, such as HTC, LG and Sony, are stuck between aggressive Chinese brands and the dominating market shares of Samsung and Apple in the premium smartphone segment,” said Gupta.
Read more: How Chinese smartphone vendors are gaining new market share
