Which phone maker has sold the most in 2015

It’s just barely past the second quarter of 2015 and the biggest smartphone makers have their knickers in a bunch trying to outdo each other, but what do the sales statistics really look like? Well, Statista has a chart with the results and they look like this globally:

We can see that the overall phone sales have increased from the second quarter of 2014 by over 35 million handsets globally, indicating approximately an 11% increment from last year.

Samsung‘s sales had dropped, reducing market share by 3.1% from the last year. Rival Apple outdid them in the high end smartphone sales, increasing sales by over 2% in the same period. This was probably due to the release of their iPhone 6 and 6 Plus phones in that period. Samsung released the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge phones almost halfway through this year so we’ll have full statistics of how that phone’s fared later on.

In a report, Anthony Scarsella, Research Manager with the International Data Company’s (IDC) Mobile Phone team said “The overall growth of the smartphone market was not only driven by the success of premium flagship devices from Samsung, Apple, and others, but more importantly by the abundance of affordable handsets that continue to drive shipments in many key markets.”

This can be seen from Huawei‘s growth by 2.2% over the year, with its improved and affordable smartphones that are competing with the biggest phone makers. We have seen phones like the Ascend Mate 7, P6 and P7 and the Honor 6 Plus. We expect it to grow its share with the latest release the Ascend P8 which is also available in Zambia.

Other phone makers like Xiaomi  and Lenovo are selling the most within their home regions like China, with Xiaomi being an Apple competitor in that region, while Lenovo struggles this year with sales and dropped its share by 0.4% in the second quarter of this year.

Melissa Chau, who is Senior Research Manager with IDC’s Mobile Phone team said “While much of the attention is being paid to Apple and Samsung in the top tier, the smartphone market in fact continues to diversify as more entrants hit this increasingly competitive market.”

She also added that ‘”While the Chinese players are clearly making gains this quarter, every quarter sees new brands joining the market. IDC now tracks over 200 different smartphone brands globally, many of them focused on entry level and mid-range models, and most with a regional or even single-country focus.”

Narrowing the stats to Zambia, we see more Samsung than Apple products, because Samsung also has low-budget models. We also see many other models that fall under the ‘Others’ tab, with replicas flooding the market at very cheap prices. Zambia being a developing country buys in on those models.

However, we expect to see a rise in Huawei products as they have started to make smarter and affordable phones. We will have to see those results at the year’s end.