Status: 16.07.2021 7:11 p.m.
In the global smartphone business, Xiaomi has taken second place, overtaking Apple. Even the market leader Samsung does not seem far away for the Chinese provider – thanks in part to Huawei.
The electronics manufacturer Xiaomi has risen to become the world’s second largest provider of smartphones and is now about to jump to the top. According to calculations by the analysis company Canalys, the Chinese increased their sales by 83 percent within a year and achieved a market share of 17 percent, mainly due to the high demand in Latin America and Africa – an increase of three percent compared to the previous quarter.
With this, Xiaomi boss Lei Jun, who founded the company in 2010 and now wants to build “smart electric cars” in addition to numerous electronic products such as e-scooters or vacuum cleaner robots, is leaving Apple behind for the first time. The US group comes with its iPhones to 14 percent. Samsung remains the market leader with around 19 percent. The top 5 are completed by the Chinese providers Oppo and Vivo, each with around ten percent market share.
Huawei is slipping
Huawei has slipped out of the global list of leading cell phone suppliers – even if the electronics group continues to play an important role in China. The network supplier had lost access to various Western technologies after sanctions by the US government under ex-President Donald Trump.
It was particularly painful for the international smartphone business that Huawei has since been unable to bring any new phones with attractive Google services such as YouTube, Gmail or Google Maps onto the market. Therefore, the company had to set up its own app platform, among other things. Obviously, this could not convince the buyers. With consequences: sales and market share almost halved in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Xiaomi benefits from the low selling price
Xiaomi was able to benefit greatly from this crash. Smartphone sales shot up in the final quarter by 32 percent to 43.3 million devices. The company is growing “rapidly”, especially abroad, explained market researcher Ben Stanton from Canalys.
The increase in sales in Latin America was even 300 percent, in Africa 150 percent and in Europe 50 percent. Xiaomi also helps that the average sales price is around 40 and 75 percent below that of Samsung and Apple.
Especially the competition among the Android manufacturers is brutal, said Ben Wood, an analyst at the market researcher CCS Insight, recently the “Handelsblatt”. “In the past five years, the quality of devices from Chinese manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Oppo, Oneplus and others has increased dramatically.”
Market continues to recover
Overall, the experts at Canalys expect further increases in sales figures on the smartphone market, also because of additional consumer spending after the Corona crisis. In 2020, demand had collapsed dramatically. In addition to the great economic uncertainty, consumers tended to buy note books and PCs for the home office.
According to Gartner market researchers, only 384.6 million smartphones were sold worldwide between October and December, 5.4 percent fewer than a year earlier. In the year as a whole, sales fell by 12.5 percent to just under 1.35 billion devices.
This year, however, the market was able to recover. In the first quarter alone, sales grew by a whopping 26 percent, according to Gardner.