According to market research firm Gartner, global smartphone sales fell by 20% in Q1 2020, largely as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.
“The coronavirus pandemic caused the global smartphone market to experience its worst decline ever,” said Anshul Gupta, Senior Research Analyst at Gartner. “Most of the leading Chinese manufacturers and Apple were severely impacted by the temporary closures of their factories in China and reduced consumer spending due to the global shelter-in-place.”
Although Samsung’s sales declined by 22.7% in Q1 2020, they retained the worldwide top spot, accounting for 18.5% of total market share. They sold 55.3 million units in Q1 2020, compared to 71.6 million in the same quarter of 2019.
Huawei sales contracted even more significantly, falling by 27.3% to 42.5 million. Despite this fall, Huawei maintained second place, with 14.2% of the market share. However, Huawei is expected to have a more challenging year ahead.
“It has developed the Huawei Mobile Service (HMS) ecosystem, but with the lack of popular Google apps and Google Play store, Huawei is unlikely to attract new smartphone buyers in international markets,” Gupta said.
In third place was Apple, with 13.7% of market share, selling 40.9 million smartphone units. This represented a year-on-year fall of 8.2%.
Xiaomi, which has 9.3% of market share, selling 27.8 million smartphones, was the only brand in the top-five smartphone vendors to witness growth in this quarter, increasing sales by 1.4%.
The fifth-largest vendor OPPO witnessed a 19.1% fall in smartphone sales, hitting 23.9 million units.
