It appears that all is right in the world again, especially for Samsung. According to the latest quarterly report on smartphone market share recently released by IDC, the South Korean phone maker has snatched back its title as the number one smartphone maker in the world. The company managed to achieve this by capturing a comfortable 22.8 percent.
Everybody knows about Samsung’s one big misstep last year -- its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone was supposed to give Apple’s iPhone 7 devices a run for their money, but persistent battery related issues had led the mobile manufacturer to conduct a couple of product recalls for the handset before eventually deciding to pull the plug on its flagship phablet. As a result, Samsung was forced to sustain losses out of the 3 million units it had to pull off the global smartphone market. But thanks to very strong sales from its Galaxy S7 models, as well as its budget friendly Galaxy J and Galaxy A lineup of handsets, it was able to hang on long enough to put itself in a good position to get back on top again.
Looking at the bigger picture, it is interesting to note that the volume of smartphone shipments across the globe has actually increased, registering a growth of 4.3 percent during the first three months of this year. Surprisingly, Samsung had little to do with it. Due to the impressive showing of a trio of Chinese phone makers, namely Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, the worldwide market for smartphone devices actually bounced back a bit. After Samsung and fierce rival Apple (which took a 14.9 percent share), Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo have taken the third, fourth, and fifth spots among the biggest smartphone vendors in the planet. These three combined to capture 12.6 percent of the worldwide market share. Huawei’s flagship offering, the P10, had a particularly good first quarter, claiming nearly 10 percent of all worldwide smartphone sales from January through March early this year.
Some will view the 4.3 percent growth as a sort of proof that the global mobile industry is not quite dead yet, despite having gone through 2016 littered with challenges. As explained by Ryan Reith, the program vice president of IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers, the global mobile industry’s growth sank to low single digits for the first time ever in its history. But in 2017, the industry seems ready to forget about 2016 -- with high profile smartphone releases from some of the world’s biggest phone makers already generating some buzz (and strong sales) just four months into the year, analysts believe there is enough momentum to keep the industry growing for the rest of 2017.
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