Gartner: Global Smartphone Sales Decline 5.7% in Q3 2020

Global smartphone shipments totaled 366 million units in the third quarter of 2020, down 5.7% from the third quarter of 2019, according to Gartner, a research and advisory company. Overall global mobile phone sales totaled 401 million units, declining 8.7% year-over-year.

Despite the downtick, the market has started to see a recovery from the slump in the first half this year when shipments dropped by 20% each quarter. 

“Global smartphone sales experienced moderate growth from the second quarter of 2020 to the third quarter,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. “This was due to pent-up demand from previous quarters.”

Gupta said that a few markets have seen early signs of recovery, including parts of mature Asia/Pacific and Latin America. “Near normal conditions in China improved smartphone production to fill in the supply gap in the third quarter which benefited sales to some extent,” he said. 

For the first time this year, smartphone sales to end-users in three of the top five markets for the regions mentioned by Gupta – India, Indonesia and Brazil – increased by 9.3%, 8.5% and 3.3%, respectively.

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Except for Samsung and Xiaomi, other top five smartphone vendors continued to experience a decrease in the third quarter of 2020.

Xiaomi grew 34.9% in the third quarter of 2020, reaching a 12.1% market share and replacing Apple to become the third biggest smartphone vendor in the world. Xiaomi’s leap was partially due to Huawei’s woes in both the domestic and global markets.