A few days ago, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released smartphone shipments report for the Chinese market in 2019. The total shipments were 389 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 6.2%. This is the third consecutive year of decline since 2017. And smartphone makers are still having a hard time. However, 5G smartphones achieved a ‘from 0 to 1’ leapfrog in 2019, with annual shipments exceeding 13 million units. Especially in the last two months of 2019, shipments exceeded 5 million units.
The year-on-year decrease of 6.2% indicates that the overall Chinese smartphone market is still in a continuous shrinking range. The research report shows that since the domestic smartphone shipments reached a historical peak of 660 million units in 2016, the data has been going down. The year-on-year decrease in 2017 reached 12.3%. And the year-on-year decrease in 2018 reached 15.6%. In contrast, the year-on-year decrease in 2019 narrowed significantly, and the overall trend showed a recovery.
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In the market environment that has shrunk in the past three years, many manufacturers have experienced the ‘dark moment’ of declining sales and decreasing share. Some brands have changed from mainstream to marginal, and some manufacturers have withdrawn from the market directly. There were still more than 20 million sales of Meizu in 2017. But in 2018, there will be less than 10 million sales. Samsung, in the ‘post-Note 7’ era, has almost lost the Chinese market. Smartisan, which was once ‘maverick’, was officially bankrupted in 2019.
Also Read: Huawei To Claim 75% Of The Chinese Smartphone Market Next Year
According to Canalys statistics, in the third quarter of this year, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, VIVO, and Apple captured 92% of the Chinese smartphone market shares. It’s an increase of 3.3% over the same period in 2018.
