Gartner: Q1 2016 smartphone sales up 3.9% to nearly 350 million

The tech industry has had numerous mainstream smash successes over the years, and while computers seemed to occupy so much of the 90’s and 00’s, it’s smartphones that get many mighty motivated these days. There is also an interesting dichotomy going on, as developed countries like America have become progressively less important when it comes to OEM’s bottom line, having given way to developing nations and their new-found need for instantly accessible technology. This is exactly why China is such a major concern for companies like Apple, and even Samsung makes it a proper priority to push its latest products there before anywhere else.

Unlike the tablet market, which continues to compress, smartphone sales are still going strong. According to a new report by Gartner, in fact, they went up 3.9% during the first three months this year to reach almost 350,000,000 devices sold, an impressive feat to say the least.

As can be seen in this table, several important things happened: Samsung saw its market share decrease ever so slightly from the same period last year, but still retained the #1 spot with 23.2% of the market. Apple, on the other hand saw a significant decrease in units sold. HUAWEI and OPPO are perhaps the real winners here, with their sales having a major boost in the year separating the first quarters.

Also provided were figures relating to worldwide smartphone sales by Operating System:

Android is the clear winner here, with its market share increasing over 5%. This is possibly a result of decreased iPhone sales (see the previous table) but is likely to also be spurred on by the undeniable boost in sales that HUAWEI and Xiaomi had. Apple’s decline therefore makes sense, though given that Tim Cook hinted at potentially big sales of the iPhone SE during the company’s first quarter 2016 earnings call, it may stand to grow significantly in the second quarter.

Windows Phone continued to shed sales, with Microsoft’s OS not even registering a full digit. At this rate it is seemingly fighting with BlackBerry for the lowest spot. Given that an extremely limited number of OEMs want to release Windows Phone 10 products, the hurdles facing Microsoft seem to be ever-mounting and the company incapable of doing anything to successfully change that.

Wrap Up

As mentioned, the real winners here are arguably two Chinese manufacturers, HUAWEI and OPPO who managed an impressive sales boost at the start of this year. Going forward the battle will seemingly only get more aggressive as companies, particularly HUAWEI, seek to expand their market share in various regions around the world.

It remains to be seen as to if these numbers ultimately prove Gartner’s own predictions incorrect. Back at the end of March, the firm published a report that total smartphone sales in 2016 would increase by only 7%. As demonstrated here, they have increased almost 4% in the first quarter alone.

What do you think of these figures? Is the overall situation as can be expected, or were there some superb surprises to see? Leave a comment down below and share your opinions on the ever-evolving smartphone sales share situation.