China's Huawei Catching Up With Apple, Samsung Smartphone Sales (livemint.com)

From a report: Chinese smartphone maker Huawei managed to gain ground on Samsung and Apple in terms of global market share last year, following the problems encountered by the two giants, the Gartner consultancy group said on Wednesday. Over the year as a whole, the Chinese maker saw its sales leap by 26.7 percent, while the South Korean and US rivals both saw their sales decline by 4.3 percent, Gartner said in a study. As result, Huawei was able to increase its share of the smartphone sector to 8.9 percent in 2016 from 7.3 percent a year earlier, while Samsung saw its market share shrink by two full percentage points to 20.5 percent and Apple's contracted to 14.4 percent from 15.9 percent. "Chinese makers succeeded in winning market share over last year and Huawei now seems to be the main rival to the two giants, even if the gap remains large," Gartner analyst Annette Zimmermann told AFP.

Comments

Of course they will

[jjthegreat]

We have seen this before with tons of mainstream devices, smartphones are no different. You have the incumbents designing and engineering something main stream while other manufacturers will come in and sell something similar with slightly less features for vastly lower costs. I think we are coming close to "peak smartphone development" where it's at the point they are good enough for almost everything we want them to do. I bought an SG 7 and quite frankly, it will be the last 800$ phone I ever buy. Nothing revolutionary, just iterative at this point. Apple and Samsung are at the top end of a saturated market. Really nowhere to go but down unless they are only interested in market share with lower end phones they can sell at lower costs. Not sure if this is the market they want to chase, especially Apple.

Re:Where?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can only choose phones supplied by your carrier? What a stupid little bitch you are.

Re:It's about time

[Curunir_wolf]

As opposed to Huawei?

What's wrong with Huawei phones? I considered buying one when I was shopping for a phone last year. I ended up getting one from Alcatel, but the Huawei phones had really good reviews and all the features I was looking for, and made my short list. They were a very popular alternative to the big (and expensive) brands.