TrendForce has released their report for smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2016 and Samsung was dominant. Out of 292 million phones shipped in the months of January through March of this year, 27.8% of those phones were Samsung devices. That is up 5.7% over the fourth quarter of 2015 but the bigger news is the massive jump they took over second place Apple. In Q4 of last year, they lead by just 1.2% in market share but in Q1 of 2016, that jumped to massive 13.4% increase in market share.
So everyone cool their jets. No, this is not the death of Apple. The reality is Samsung delivered two very impressive devices in the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge which were almost universally
TrendForce Phone Shipments Q1 2016
praised for their design and performance. Samsung has also done a great job of keeping these devices up-to-date and in the mind of consumers with some great advertising. Apple, on the other hand, also released a phone this past quarter, the iPhone SE, which was certainly not a flagship device for Cupertino. It would be an – pardon the pun – apples-to-oranges comparison. My suspicion is that we will see these numbers grow closer together when Apple does release the iPhone 7 at some point this summer.
What may be more interesting to some readers is that the other big players in the phone market – Huawei, Lenovoa, Xiaomi and LG – where all pretty much flat in their market share in this report over last quarter. All had growth but nothing like what Samsung saw in the report.
You can read the full report over on the TrendForce website which has some great market information on the smartphone world in general.
