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Smartphone market starts to recover in Q3: Samsung dominates as Huawei crashes

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a heavy decline in the smartphone market this year, but Q3 2020 has seen shipments start to recover according to a new report from Gartner.

In Q3 2020, the smartphone market as a whole saw a 5.7% decline compared to Q3 2019. Combined, smartphone manufacturers shipped around 366 million units, down from 388 million the same time in 2019. That’s far better than the 20% losses seen in the past two quarters.

Over the past year, Samsung and Xiaomi both saw considerable growth. Samsung continues to dominate the market in first place with 22% market share and over 80 million units sold. Xiaomi also moved up to 12.1% share, shipping over 44 million units, up from 32 million in 2019 and totaling nearly 35% growth YoY.

Samsung and Xiaomi were the only vendors in the top five to experience growth in the third quarter of 2020. Samsung benefited from its strong positioning amongst Android users and recorded sales of 80.8 million units. Xiaomi grew 34.9% in the third quarter of 2020, securing 12.1% market share and moving past Apple into the No. 3 position. Xiaomi gained from Huawei’s loss including strong performance in China.

On the other hand, Huawei continues to crash as it still deals with the US ban. The Chinese giant shipped around 51 million units in Q3, down over 21% since 2019 and lagging far behind Samsung at this point, the rival it used to battle for first place with.

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Apple also saw a minor drop in Q3 2020, losing a little over half a percent YoY. That’s attributable to the late launch of new iPhones, though.

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