Global smartphone market continues to fall but still growing in Brazil

According to Gartner, global smartphone sales to end users fell 1.7% in the second quarter of 2019 to 368 million units. "Demand for high-end smartphones has decreased at a faster rate than demand for medium and low-end smartphones," said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. “To try to drive smartphone replacements, we've seen manufacturers bringing premium features like multi-line front / rear cameras, frameless monitors and large batteries from their top smartphones at lower priced models.

Among the top five global smartphone suppliers, Huawei and Samsung had the largest annual sales increases in the second quarter of 2019, with 16.5% and 3.8%, respectively ( see Table ). "As a result, both increased their market share in the quarter, which led them to account for more than a third of total smartphone sales worldwide," said Gupta.

The announcement of the ban on Huawei led to a sharp decline in Huawei smartphone sales in the global market in the second quarter of 2019, although sales improved slightly by postponing the ban. While total smartphone sales were weaker in the world, strong promotion and brand positioning helped Huawei sell a record number of smartphones in Greater China in the quarter, growing 31% in the region.

Samsung returned to growth, Apple continued to refuse

Samsung sold more than 75 million smartphones in the second quarter of 2019 and increased its share by 1.1 percentage points year over year. "Strong demand for Samsung's new Galaxy A series smartphones and the redesign of the full range of entry-level and mid-range smartphones has helped this positive performance," said Gupta. “Demand for the Samsung Galaxy S10 flagship began to weaken during the quarter, however, indicating that achieving growth in 2019 as a whole will be a challenge.”

IPhones sales continued to decline year after year, albeit to a lesser extent compared to the first quarter of 2019. Apple sold just over 38 million iPhones in the second quarter, a 13.8% decline from the previous year. . "Very few incremental benefits are preventing current iPhone users from replacing their smartphones," said Gupta. Apple reached a turning point marked by the shift from its business to services, which accounted for 21% of total vendor revenue in the first quarter. 2019. ”

China and Brazil: Only Top 5 Countries Show Smartphone Sales Growth

Among the top five countries in smartphone sales, China ranked first with 101 million smartphone sales in the second quarter of 2019, an increase of 0.5% over the previous year. With more 5G smartphone models available in Q2, suppliers in China had to clear inventory of high-end 4G smartphone models. Reaching 10.8 million smartphone sales in the same period, Brazil was the only other country in the top five to grow (1.3% year-on-year). As Brazil's economy is beginning to recover slowly, this smartphone growth is a small indicator of stronger economic growth expected in 2020.

India sold a total of 35.7 million smartphones, reaching a market share of 9.7% in the second quarter of 2019. These sales in India were down 2.3% from the previous year, mainly due to slowing consumer updates from mobile phones to smartphones.

Global smartphone sales will remain weak for the rest of the year. Gartner analysts expect worldwide smartphone sales to end users to reach 1.5 billion units by 2019.