2016 Chinese 1H Market Share Report: Huawei, OPPO & Apple Leads the Domestic Sales

The Chinese smartphone market has reached the saturation point, and all the smartphone manufacturers can see its results. Apple and Samsung which are top two global smartphone manufacturers are now looking to increase their market share in India which is the second largest smartphone market next to China. Even most of the Chinese brands have started selling their smartphones in India along with other Asian countries. With their affordable pricing and decent build quality, the growth of Chinese brands in India comes at the cost of local brands like Micromax, Intex, Karbonn and others.

Now the Sino Market Research report reveals some interesting numbers for the first half of 2016 (1H16) Chinese smartphone market. Huawei continues its authority in the Chinese market by selling a total of 43.77 million devices in the 1H16. OPPO in the second position is far behind with 20.02 million sales. Xiaomi, which has been in the top position a few quarters ago is now dropped to the fifth position. Apple and Vivo are placed in the third and fourth position respectively. Apart from Huawei, there is no much difference between the other top 5 brands.

While Xiaomi in the 5th position sold 23.65 million units, Samsung with just 13.57 million sales sits in the sixth position. Lenovo along with Motorola is not even in top 10 that too in its home country. In the first six months of 2016, Lenovo had sold only 5.84 million devices which much lower than the brands like Meizu, Gionee, LeEco, and Coolpad. Coming to the offline sales in the 1H16, OPPO leads the chart with 28.04 million sales while Huawei with a very slight difference is only limited to the second position. Vivo, which also bets big on offline sales sold 24.81 million devices and occupied the third spot ahead of Apple and Samsung.

Xiaomi has shown its strength in the online sales; it is the number one brand in the online sales chart by selling 17.45 million devices. Here too, Huawei sits in the second position with 15.81 million sales. LeEco (LeTV) is the third largest online smartphone brand but has sales of only 5.31 million devices which is just 33% of Huawei’s sales. We can see the Huawei’s dominance in the offline as well as online sales, while the global brands like Samsung and Apple aren’t that impressive with their numbers.

Samsung came up with exclusive Galaxy C series for China and will also exclusively launch the special 6GB RAM variant of Galaxy Note 7 especially for China. It shows how Chinese sales are affecting Samsung while Apple brought the Apple iPhone SE with the 4-inch display just for the developing markets like China and India. Even with this kind of special efforts, there is no growth in their market shares. On the other hand, Huawei as the third largest smartphone maker in the world has been rapidly expanding its market.

Xiaomi also announced to sell their smartphones in the U.S in the coming days, while LeEco already sells their Super TVs in the U.S along with few other accessories. Even the smaller brands like Meizu, Coolpad, and Qihoo 360 already launched quite a few devices in 2016. Though the Chinese market had reached its saturation point, we can expect smaller brands to eat up the market share from top manufacturers. While most of the Chinese brands also sell their smartphones in India, they might even widen up their reach in the coming years.