Huawei and Apple fare best in declining global smartphone market

Gartner’s belated shipment numbers tally with prompter ones to show a global smartphone market that declined by 20% in Q2 2020.

Most of Gartner’s competitors got their Q2 numbers out at the end of July, but Gartner likes to take its sweet time. Whether or not the extra weeks required by its languid analysts results in greater accuracy is anyone’s guess, but the year-on-year trend they observe is still interesting. Within a market that Gartner reckons declined by 20.4%, Huawei only declined by 6.8% and Apple hardly declined at all.

“The improved situation in China saw demand recovering quarter on quarter,” said Anshul Gupta of Gartner. “Travel restrictions, retail closures and more prudent spending on nonessential products during the pandemic led to the second consecutive quarterly decline in smartphone sales this year.

“Huawei’s performance in China helped it avoid a worse quarterly performance. Huawei extended its lead in China where it captured 42.6% of China’s smartphone market in the second quarter of 2020. Huawei put in place an aggressive product introduction and sales promotion in China in particular and benefited from the strong support of communications services providers for its 5G smartphones.

“Apple’s iPhone sales fared better in the quarter than most smartphone vendors in the market and also grew sales quarter-over-quarter. The improved business environment in China helped Apple achieve growth in the country. In addition, the introduction of the new iPhone SE encouraged users of older phones upgrade their smartphones.”

We usually plug Strategy Analytics’ numbers into our spreadsheet but were unable to track down its latest release on the matter, so Counterpoint gets a turn because we still trust their numbers more than Gartner’s. They reckon Huawei grabbed number one spot for the first time ever thanks to the unique circumstances and their global total also shows a 20% decline, so that will do for us.