A fresh batch of data on the premium smartphone market, released by CounterPoint Research, has put into perspective the giant strides that Apple has taken over the past year. (CPR is one of the world’s leading tech-market research firms and their data is trusted by many market experts.)
Here’s what the new data shows —
Apple captured a record share of the important premium segment, widening the gap with Samsung by more than 50%.
As can be seen, just a few months back — over July/Aug 2016 — Apple wasn’t doing so great.
Its sales were falling, while at the same time, Samsung was racing ahead. In August 2016, Samsung and Apple were separated by less than 20 percentage points. However, after that, Apple picked up, while Samsung started slacking.
“Over the summer, Apple was selling just over 50% of the global premium smartphones, and Samsung was selling just under 25%. By December 2016, those numbers had grown to 70% and 17%, respectively.” (Source)
Currently, Apple is controlling over 70% of the premium smartphone market globally.
Please note that these numbers are for the global market, and not just for either US or UK. So the rise in the popularity of iPhone 7 seems to be universal.
The numbers almost similar in India as well.
Just yesterday, we reported that “Apple ended the last quarter with 62% of the market share, followed by Samsung at 35% and Google Pixel at 5%.”
As you can see, the only difference here is that Samsung is doing a lot better in this category in India. However, Apple is still beating it.
We do not yet have sufficient insight into what really caused this peak in Apple’s premium smartphone market share — or the decline in Samsung’s. Of course, we do have a few guesses.
Note 7 fiasco definitely helped.
The premium smartphone market has very few players, therefore, the competition can turn upside down just with one competitor out. Probably that’s what happened when the Note 7 pulled out of the race after their burning fiasco.
Peter Richardson, Research Director at Counterpoint Research explains:
“Part of the reason being the absence of Galaxy Note 7 and rising competition from rivals’ flagships such as Huawei Mate 8, Google Pixel and Moto Z in some markets. While Galaxy S7 series sales have been strong, they’ve not been strong enough to fill the void left by the Galaxy Note 7.”
Well, whatever be the case, after almost a year of facing backlash over various things, Apple has finally silenced the critics, and how! No wonder Apple’s Quarterly sales are doing so well!
The coming year will be a tough fight for both.
As for the future, it’s going to be a tough competition indeed between iPhone 8 and Galaxy 8. It’ll be interesting to see if the new flagship from Samsung will be able to gain back some of its share in the premium smartphone market. We will be rooting for the iPhone 8, of course!
