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by Adrian Diaconescu | September 15, 2016 4:57 AMRead OnThere are a lot of numbers in that headline, many of which need context and perspective to mean something, but as always, the bottom line is Apple knows how to rapidly and widely spread a major new software update like no other. It’s the advantage of building iPhones and iPads in-house from the ground up, not partnering with third-party OEMs, and taking away the privilege of proprietary optimization, i.e. custom bloat, from carriers. Despite a hiccup “during the first hour of availability” threatening the smooth expansion of iOS 10, everything ultimately went according to plan on ...
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by Adrian Diaconescu | September 7, 2016 4:53 AMRead OnStill not convinced a second-generation Apple Watch will finally break cover later today, alongside the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, thinking perhaps Cupertino might take even more time to substantially upgrade the rudimentary original model? One look over the International Data Corporation’s global wearable shipment numbers for Q2 2016, and you’ll understand why the Apple Watch 2 needs to launch yesterday. The OG’s post-holiday slump continued, despite a “reduced price strategy” on the Sport variant, with 1.6 million units sold worldwide between April and June, massively down from 3.6 ...
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by Adrian Diaconescu | September 6, 2016 4:57 AMRead OnThe worldwide smartphone OS sales numbers for the three-month period ending July 2016 are in, and as always, Android comfortably dominates every single important market, with iOS a distant second across the board, and Windows Phone (or Mobile) plunging further down towards obsolescence. But interestingly enough, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech claims, Apple managed to achieve year-on-year growth in most regions, including the US, EU5, and Australia, despite iPhone 7’s proximity presumably prompting many iFans to hold off for a “major” upgrade. All in all, the iPhone SE no longer looks like ...
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by Jules Wang | August 24, 2016 1:40 PMRead OnThe faster the word "Phone" fades and the word "Mobile" brightens, the better off Microsoft will be. But it's gonna be a long, long, long run. AdDuplex has issued a new report for Windows device statistics for this month and it says that while Windows Phone 8.1 still makes up about 77 percent of the ecosystem, Windows 10 Mobile's stance at 14 percent represents accelerated growth from previous months. "Last month the growth doubled from 0.5% to 1%. This month it more than doubled again," AdDuplex reported. Within the Windows 10 subgroup, 52 percent are already on the Anniversary update. ...
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by Jules Wang | August 21, 2016 11:43 PMRead OnXiaomi CEO Hugo Barra said that his company will be pushing more of its electronics to the US this year. While thought to be a quite seasoned player in China, it's a six-year-old "lifestyle technology" upstart to the rest of the world, which is why Barra is on an introduction mission. "We are looking forward to introducing our brand to US consumers," Barra said to Bloomberg. "We're going to do it in the same way that we've done it in other markets. The company's targeting the young crowd (as is Huawei's competing sub-brand, Honor) through social media. India is the largest target at this ...
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by Jules Wang | August 15, 2016 10:21 AMRead OnWhile OPPO and Vivo are proving to be the insurgent forces — technically separate, but under one umbrella — in China, we still see Huawei lead the pack for total shipments. Digitimes is reporting some room for growth on what's thought to be a super-saturated market for smartphones this past Q2 — a 2.7 percent sequential increase and a 14.3 percent annual jump to 149 million phones. Local vendors seem to be packing in more deliveries of mid-range and budget models. Huawei logged a 14 percent share of the pie or about 20.9 million shipments. OPPO came second with 12.7 percent, ...
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by Adrian Diaconescu | August 10, 2016 9:01 AMRead OnDespite the generally bleak picture painted by most market research companies and industry analysts when it comes to recent iPhone box-office numbers and Apple’s realistic expectations going forward, it’s not all doom and gloom for the world’s enduring top mobile OEM in terms of actual financial gains. Not only does Cupertino continue to make way more money than Samsung or Huawei on higher device prices and a refusal to compete in the low-end segment, with the latest smartphone OS data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech showing an iOS comeback in the US and Europe’s five largest ...
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by Adrian Diaconescu | July 22, 2016 7:47 AMRead OnMere days ahead of official financial reports coming from most of the mobile industry’s heavyweights, research firm TrendForce has issued its own worldwide smartphone market analysis for the year’s second quarter, with overall production volume sitting at a solid 315 million units, up 8.9 percent sequentially and 3.2 percent compared to the same timeframe back in 2015. No big surprises ranking the top six global brands, as Samsung holds on to a comfortable lead, followed by Apple, Huawei, OPPO, LG, and Vivo. But even though Galaxy S7 sales are deemed “brisk”, both the Korean ...
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by Jules Wang | July 21, 2016 8:13 PMRead OnThe smartwatch market contracted for the first time in the second quarter and it's all Apple's fault. While it retained its top spot in the rankings, the 1.6 million shipments the company made is a big dip from its debut quarter that had 3.6 million shipments. Surprisingly, it was the only vendor out of the top five to lose shipments, meaning that those manufacturers had a lot of offsetting to do. Here is the data according to IDC: [table] Vendor,Q2 shipments (in millions),Q2 market share,Change from last year Apple,1.6,47%,-55% Samsung,0.6,16%,51% Lenovo,0.3,9%,75% LG ...
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by Jules Wang | July 13, 2016 1:06 PMRead OnJust as Apple's latest earnings report is just a snapshot of how poorly the iPhone 6s is performing, consider Kantar Worldpanel's latest report on Cupertino's rivalry with Samsung another symptom of the problem. It has logged Samsung's mobile market share in the US at 37 percent for the three months ending in May. That's compared to Apple's 29 percent. Specifically regarding the latest flagship releases, the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge took 16 percent of the pie while the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus was at 14.6 percent. The crossover story remains the same: 14 percent of Apple customers came from ...
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by Adrian Diaconescu | July 13, 2016 8:20 AMRead OnThe latest Kantar Worldpanel ComTech numbers are in, and as always, both Google and Apple can see bright spots and negatives in the box-office feats of smartphones running the two most popular operating systems. But there are arguably more positives to notice in the March-to-May sales results of Android handsets, which not only dominated the charts from EU5 markets to the US and China, also reporting yearly growth essentially everywhere. Check that, it’s literally everywhere, the gains compared to the same three-month period of 2015 ranging from a measly 2.4 percent on Chinese shores ...
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by Jules Wang | June 15, 2016 8:30 PMRead OnWe're about to end the second calendar quarter of 2016 and Kantar Worldpanel is putting out numbers for the first quarter. With numbers like these, it takes time to make sure they're right. And we'd wonder how right these figures can't be. Android has gotten some major annual gains in market share across the world. In the US, it's a 5.2 basis point jump to 67.6 percent. The platform's grown by 5.4 points in China to 78.8 percent. In the markets of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, — labeled the "EU5" — share came to 70.2 percent, up 5.8 points. The biggest increase ...
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by Jules Wang | June 2, 2016 12:35 PMRead OnA quick follow-up to our story yesterday about Xiaomi topping the market share pie chart in China — apparently, one chart doesn't tell the whole story. An OPPO representative clarified to us that while Xiaomi did take a win in Sino Research's April report, OPPO got another one. Xiaomi led the market in online-based sales while OPPO had the most offline sales for the month. Here's how those numbers stack up: [table] OEM,Share (%) OPPO,13.3 Apple,11.9 vivo,11.7 Huawei,10 Samsung,6.8 Gionee,4.6 HONOR,3.9 Coolpad,3.4 MI,2.9 Meizu,2.6 [/table] Though listed, brands of western interest that ...
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by Jules Wang | May 31, 2016 6:49 PMRead OnIn the United States, when you talk about smartphones, you usually talk about how much of the rest of the market is affected by Apple's weight. Not the case anymore. In Counterpoint Research's latest Market Monitor report for the first quarter, Cupertino's lead on the other OEMs has been thinning out for the past year. It has dropped from 46 percent last year to 33 percent this year. While it still heads the pack, Samsung is nipping at the heels with a 28 percent share, 2 percent better than 2015. LG dropped 1 percent to 15 percent, but that's after seven straight quarters of gains. ...
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by Jules Wang | May 30, 2016 1:25 PMRead OnIs it still fair game to call Xiaomi a startup? It's had the typical meteoric rise that successful firms have had and it's getting out of its first major rut in sales with the release of a new flagship or two. The Chinese manufacturer's CEO, Lei Jun, is thanking supporters for helping it top the home market in April. Specifically, the Sino Market Research report said that Xiaomi got 26 percent of the market. It didn't signify whether the numbers were for sales or shipments. Huawei and Honor, while technically separate, come within striking distance of Xiaomi at a combined 23.7 percent. ...
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by Jules Wang | May 19, 2016 6:53 PMRead OnKantar released its report on the state of the smartphone market last week, now it's Gartner's turn. More smartphones entered the market in this quarter than the same time last year. Fittingly in time for Google I/O, it's a victory this time around for Android at the expense of all the other major platforms. Research firm Gartner reported first quarter sales for smartphones worldwide totaled 349 million units, up 3.9 percent annually. Android sold approximately 293.8 million units representing 84 percent of the market, up more than 5 points. Apple itself reported iPhone sales, but Gartner ...
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by Adrian Diaconescu | May 12, 2016 3:53 AMRead On
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech’s smartphone numbers for the three months ending March 2016 are in, and it’s the same old story over again. Android keeps surging, Windows Phone moves one step closer to obsolescence, while iOS posts more worrying losses. Wait, that’s not exactly what Apple came to expect from a timeframe in which the latest iPhone release wasn’t quite out-of-date. But after underwhelming holiday sales, and a recent financial report causing panic among investors, we’re not at all shocked to hear the global mobile OS duopoly is slowly heading towards a monopoly. ...
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by Jules Wang | May 4, 2016 2:25 PMRead OnApple's apocalypse/demise/plateau has firmed up enough for the time being to give Samsung the biggest portion of the US smartphone market. At least, it was the case back in March. Counterpoint Research reports that Apple had 23 percent market share, short of Samsung's 28.8 percent. It's the first monthly win for Samsung in 11 months and signals that the Galaxy S7 and the Galaxy S7 edge did indeed have great first-month results, especially when pitting them against the Galaxy S6's sales. Rounding the top five are LG (17.1 percent), ZTE (6.6 percent) and Alcatel (4.5 percent). Global ...
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by Jules Wang | April 19, 2016 10:54 PMRead OnIs it time for the tablet wars? In Australia, quite possibly. We've seen the PC marketplace at full capacity and at low interest for a few years — and we've been covering the reasons why that's the case. As PC-makers try and consolidate (and fail to do so), we may a resurgence in the plateaued tablet market. Specifically, we're talking about convertible tablets. Research and analysis company Telsyte decided to put its eyes to the land down under and found that Windows and iOS took away market share from Android in a shrinking overall market. In fact, the market's in its second year of ...
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by Adrian Diaconescu | April 6, 2016 4:30 AMRead OnIf you thought the three months leading up to January were bad for iOS and the mobile iteration of Windows, as Android smartphones copiously dominated holiday sales in all key global markets, wait until you check out Kantar Worldpanel’s December – February numbers. Even with many Android power users on standby for Galaxy S7, LG G5 or HTC 10 launches, the world-dominant platform managed to consolidate and improve its supremacy from Paris to Berlin and Beijing to New York. Stateside, the gap between the gold and silver medalists surged from less than 17 percent in the 90-day timeframe ...
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by Jules Wang | March 9, 2016 8:43 PMRead OnAnother edition of Kantar Worldpanel's Smartphone OS Market Share Data report has come out and this one's a doozy for both iOS and Windows. The numbers cover the holiday quarter of 2015 and they seem to show an overall decline in interest with Windows-based phones and iPhones. Windows saw a couple of steep changes downwards year-over-year, with Italy seeing a 6 percent loss in share, France down 5.2 percent and Australia off by 3.3 percent. Small, but measurable gains were made in Great Britain and Japan. Still, with shares dropping from double digits to below 8 percent, it's not a pretty ...
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by Jules Wang | November 17, 2015 12:25 AMRead OnAndroid might still eat iOS's lunch in terms of global usage share, but with the annual bean counts coming up in the tens of billions, you have to wonder how much money the iPhone makes for Apple. Well, at least for this past quarter, it seems like we've reached a high watermark. 94 percent. That figure according to Canaccord Genuity research. Samsung came in second place with a staggering 11 percent while Sony, HTC, BlackBerry and Lenovo ended up in the negatives and, thus, accounts for the mathematical discrepancy. Compare these numbers with the shipment report from this quarter: the ...
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by Jules Wang | November 4, 2015 9:53 PMRead OnPainting a picture of all the arcs of mobile phone manufacturers can be pretty difficult. Apple's on the rise here, down over there. Samsung is winning and losing. Everyone's on tectonic plates. Fortunately, there's a new global view we now have access to. Sales data analysts at Kantar WorldPanel ComTech have crunched the numbers from several geographical markets and have come to some interesting observations about Huawei and Apple devices for calendar Q3. iOS has the highest market share in Great Britain it ever had for a third quarter. Also in Great Britain, Samsung and LG were the ...
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by Jules Wang | November 3, 2015 11:14 PMRead OnEvery so often, our Stephen Schenck likes to point out that RAM is really cheap nowadays. And indeed, many phones have taken advantage of that fact with 4GB now the new benchmark for close-to-flagship-tier smartphones and devices. Because why not? Especially after some RAM management kerfuffles. Well, we now have industry sources from Korea telling us about the war games they're playing with Chinese manufacturers as RAM is going, going, gone down to basement prices. Try $16.70 for a 4GB DDR3 module last month, down 9.5 percent from September's price. Metrics tracker DRAMeXchange expects ...
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by Jaime Rivera | October 21, 2015 11:39 AMRead On
This has been a good year for Samsung, and mainly if you compare it to how the company was performing over the two last previous years. Surely Galaxy phones are not what we loved them to be, specially if we remember Samsung's approach to phablets in the past, but this formula has seemed to work well for the company regardless. Today we get more details on how the marketshare is behaving, and Sammy seems to be ok. Asian analysts are already providing insight on global marketshare and we notice that even though Samsung's sales are on decline, the margin is not only low, but also far from ...
