Smartphone vendor market share in China Q1 2014-Q4 2024
As of the third quarter of 2024, Vivo accounted for the highest market share of smartphone shipments in China at 18.5 percent. In the same observed period, Honor, a divested brand from Huawei since November 2020, gained significant market shares, while Huawei itself, leading player in this market by the end of 2020, has returned to the top five list after a two-year absence. Huawei made a comeback after the launch of the Mate 60 Pro, which took the industry by surprise.
Development of Chinese smartphone market
Having contributed massively to the Chinese economy in the last decade, the smartphone industry has been a rather successful industry in China for a long time. This success has even started to spread overseas, mainly from the leading vendors Huawei, OPPO and Xiaomi. Since 2011, the number of smartphone shipments in China has steadily increased, reaching over 460 million units in 2016 at the highest ever shipment. However, the figure dropped slightly since 2017, and continue to below 400 million units from 2018. Despite this decline, more smartphones were sold in China than in any other country in the world.
Smartphones in China
China is a country where the smartphone is the key to every-day life. In 2014, there were 482.7 million smartphone users in China. By 2022, this figure reached over one billion and was subsequently expected to exceed 1.2 billion users by 2027. In terms of operating systems, Google’s Android holds around 77 percent of the market share, whereas Apple’s iOS accounts for about 22 percent of the smartphone operating system market in China. Despite the relatively easier access to cheap smartphones in the market, Chinese consumers still considered the practicalities, namely the internal memory and processor, as the most importantly factor when buying a phone, even much more than the price level and photo qualities.
