The latest iPhones and devices from China’s Huawei were hot tickets during a near-record quarter for smartphone makers.
Apple shipped 48 million iPhones worldwide during the third quarter, up 22 percent from the same period a year ago, while Huawei shipped 26.5 million smartphones, good for a leap of 61 percent, according to a report released Wednesday by market researcher International Data Corp.
The raw numbers put those two companies in second and third place, respectively, behind market leader Samsung and its 84.5 million smartphones. The South Korean electronics giant, whose smartphone sales have seen better days, recorded much more modest growth of just 6 percent. That growth rate was just under the market average.
China’s Lenovo and Xiaomi rounded out the top five.
Altogether, IDC said, smartphone makers shipped 355.2 million units in the third quarter, up 6.8 percent year over year, for the second-best quarter ever for worldwide smartphone shipments.
That’s bound to be welcome news. Smartphone makers have been facing the challenge of piquing consumers’ interest in the saturated markets of North America and Europe, and in the once booming economy of China. There’s been a sense of smartphone fatigue as recent generations of marquee phones have tended to offer incremental updates instead of the attention-grabbing changes that can ignite sales.
Fortunately, there are lots of takers for more modest phones.
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SOURCE: Cnet, Paula Vasan
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