South Korean Giants, Samsung Electronics, have again become the world’s biggest smartphone producer, thus, taking the crown back from US tech giants Apple. They have generated almost 20% of the overall global sales in the first quarter of this new year. They are followed by Apple and Xiaomi.
Xiaomi, the leading Chinese smartphone company, has had an amazing quarter. In fact, the first quarter of this year has proven to be its best quarterly performance ever. Overall, Xiaomi’s shipments rose by a massive 62% to 49 million phones.
This has taken the company’s market share to 14%. The market of Samsung, which is leading this race, has a market share of 22%. Whereas, Apple had a market share of 15%. The South Korean smartphone company has shipped 76.5 million smartphones in this quarter and declared a 66% surge in quarterly profit in the smartphone business.
This is mostly due to the positive reaction of the customers towards their flagship Galaxy S21 smartphone series. On the other hand, Apple shipped just 52.4 million iPhones in this quarter.
The total smartphone sales in the markets globally registered a strong surge of 27% to 347 million units in Q1. The main reasons behind this positive development are the opening up of the Chinese economy and a swift vaccine rollout in the United States.
Apple has stated that overall sales to China have nearly doubled. But even after this, Samsung has overtaken them to reclaim their spot as the world’s biggest smartphone producer. One major point which has affected the smartphone and auto industry, and might continue to affect in the short term is the global shortage of critical components, such as semiconductor chipsets.
These are an important component of smartphones and if their shortage continues, we might OEMs struggling in the next few quarters. Apple has already declared that a shortage of chipsets could cost the company $3 billion to $4 billion in revenue in the April-June quarter. Let’s see what the future of these smartphone OEMs holds.
