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No matter how hard they tried, Microsoft was not able to retain its position as the third largest mobile phone vendor because it was recently surpassed by a very strong competitor – Huawei.
While Apple and Samsung still remain the world’s favorite smartphone producers, Microsoft was unable to make a mark, in spite of the fact that purchasing Nokia brought them considerable earnings on the mobile phone market. However, this year they were only able to sell 27.8 million phones, way fewer than they did last year, when they managed to ship more than 50 million.
As a consequence, Huawei won third place. It seems that the company has sold over 30 million phones so far. This is almost 50 percent more than it shipped last year. Compared to that, Mircosoft’s shipments only grew by 2 percent.
Analysts report that the Chinese company now holds 7 percent market share, not far from Apple, which holds 10 percent. Microsoft comes in fourth, while the fifth position is held by Xiaomi, another Chinese smartphone producer.
A representative of Strategy Analytics spoke about the whole situation of the smartphone market and said that a 2 percent growth in sales was recorded globally. According to him, this is the weakest performance for 2 year in a row, mostly “due to slowing demand for handsets in China, Europe and the U.S.”
What is clear is the fact that people prefer smartphones. Statistics show that 80 percent of the total mobile phone shipments were represented by smartphones.
Samsung is definitely the world leader when it comes to smartphone shipments, as it now holds 20 percent market share. In spite of its 7 percent fall over the last couple of years, it still managed to sell over 89 million phones in 2015. Nevertheless, this is 6 million fewer phones than they shipped in 2014.
“Samsung has stabilized volumes in the high-end, but its lower-tier mobile phones continue to face intense competition from rivals such as Huawei in Asia,” said Neil Mawtson, the Executive Director at Strategy Analytics.
Even if it is the second most popular, Apple’s sales are on increase mode and its iPhones are becoming incredibly popular. This is reflected in the growing number of shipments, by 35 percent annually. It was reported that they managed to sell about 47.5 million phones this year. Their lowest performance was recorded on the Chinese market.
Analysts are not at all surprised at this turn of events, given the rapid growth of the Chinese market:
“You have the rapidly growing Chinese market and the international market and Huawei has been very aggressive. As we’ve seen with the most recent announcement from Microsoft, they have been less than successful and are pulling back. I would expect Microsoft’s slide to probably continue,” said Roger Entner, the main analyst at Recon Analytics.
Image Source: ibtimes
