In A Landmark Defeat, Apple Loses to Samsung During the Holiday Quarter

It’s happened, folks. iPhones took a huge hit in sales in 2018, leading to it being dethroned as the best selling smartphone in the world. And the claimant to the leading title now? None other than Apple’s arch-nemesis Samsung.

Right from the time it made a debut in 2007, the iPhone enjoyed a solid run in the market. Till date, it has not witnessed a combined revenue and profit decline, until now that is. During this holiday quarter, Apple shipped 68.4 million iPhones as compared to Samsung’s much larger number of 70.4 million. And even though Samsung’s own sales dropped by 5.5%, they still sold enough handsets to overtake Apple, which witnessed a fall of 11.5%.

These numbers come to us courtesy of a research firm IDC and are supported by Apple’s earnings call which showed that the Cupertino-based company saw a major slowdown in sales during the second half of 2018.

According to the tech giant, the main culprit for this is the economic condition in China that caused sales in this country to fall from $18 billion to $13.7 billion, a sharp decrease of 26.7% on a year-over-year basis.

But we think that they’re a couple other factors at play here. For starters, the 2018 iPhones have been priced exorbitantly, making people think twice before the shell out good money for them. And then, there’s the issue of the rising dollar value which is causing the already expensive iPhones to become even more unaffordable outside of the US.

If it’s any consolation to Apple, the smartphone market overall is in a bit of a slump, witnessing a 4.9% drop in year-over-year sales from 2017. This is true regardless of brands like Huawei, OPPO and Xiaomi making great headway among the audience in general.

When asked about this general decline sales, Ryan Reith, vice president of IDC Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers said, “Globally the smartphone market is a mess right now. Outside of a handful of high-growth markets like India, Indonesia, Korea, and Vietnam, we did not see a lot of positive activity in 2018. We believe several factors are at play here, including lengthening replacement cycles, increasing penetration levels in many large markets, political and economic uncertainty, and growing consumer frustration around continuously rising price points.”

Well, he certainly makes a good point and we truly hope that smartphone manufacturers get their heads out of their arses and do something about “growing consumer frustration around continuously rising price points.” The day they do, we’re guessing that people will be more willing to loosen their purse strings and smartphone sales are likely to go up.