Samsung and Apple are losing more of their smartphone market share to Huawei, according to new research. The reasons customers are turning away from these two powerhouse brands are due to the high prices on their top models.
Gartner, a tech research firm, showed that Huawei’s percentage of the market share has climbed more than 15% since December 2018, which is up more than 4 percentage points from the same time last year.
Samsung and Apple, the biggest competitors of Huawei, are still ranked first and second regarding market share, and cover roughly 17 and 16 percent of the industry, respectively.
However, in the fourth quarter year-over-year, both of these companies lost a portion of the market share. Apple’s share dropped roughly 2%, and Samsung dipped about 1%.
“Apple has really been losing ground on a couple of things, especially when it comes to emerging markets like Greater China,” Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner, said in an interview with CNBC. “What we are seeing in China is that the leading Chinese players have raised the quality of their smartphones significantly.”
In the fourth quarter of 2018, Apple sold 64.5 million iPhones, which is down almost 12% from the same period the previous year. The reason for the declining sales is because of a slow sales performance in China. iPhone revenues have dropped about 15% in the first quarter year-over-year.
“When you look at the flagship smartphones from Huawei, or from Oppo and Vivo, they have features that one can find in the flagship smartphones of Samsung and Apple, but at the same time the prices are quite low,” Gupta said.
Because the Galaxy and iPhone seem to only improving marginally with each upgrade, people are becoming less willing to shell out roughly $1,000 and are turning to cheaper phones that have comparable features like Huawei and other Chinese brands.
