iPhone Sales Drop for the first time in 5 years as people prefer Chinese brands

Apple is one of the top smartphone manufacturers in the world and the company has been making smartphones for about a decade now. However, things have not been stable for them last year. Overall smartphone sales have dropped significantly affecting the sales figures for them. This could be due to a lot of reasons, but we hope Apple starts to do something about it as the latest reports from China could be quite disturbing for them. According to a new report from Counterpoint Research, Apple did not manage to hold on to the tag of having the top-selling smartphone in 2016 in China.

While Apple slipped from the top position, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo stepped in and took the cake for selling the most number of smartphones last year. It looks like the company sold over 17 million units of Oppo R9 smartphone whereas the Cupertino tech giant only managed to sell 12 million units. This total sales figure from Oppo accounted for 4-percent of market share. And that’s not all the bad news for Apple and there’s more to it. Apple also failed to contribute to the smartphone sales growth. It slipped to the bottom barely making along with Xiaomi which is another surprise.

The total smartphone sales in China rose by 6-percent as a total of 465 million units were delivered. Due to this Oppo saw an overall growth in shipments by 109-percent whereas the other Chinese brands like Vivo, Huawei managed to stay in the race with 78-percent & 21-percent increase in shipments respectively. On the other hand, Apple’s shipments in the country declined by 21-percent last year which is comparatively better than Xiaomi which saw a decline of 22-percent last year. Hence, the bigger picture is not looking good for Apple as this is the first time in 5 years that the company’s numbers have gone down significantly in China.

Researchers say that the reason for the decline in sales is due to the higher demand for mid-range smartphones in China. And as we all know, Apple is not known for mid-range smartphones as they don’t have anything to offer in that area. It is also expected that if Apple manages to bring something new to the table this year in terms of innovation, then there are chances for them to get back on the race. Talking about innovation, if Apple manages to crack the whole bezel-less OLED iPhone as the rumors suggest, then it would definitely a step in the right direction for them.