The economic analysis firm Strategy Analytics yesterday published a series of studies on the results and market trends in the first quarter of 2016 in three different categories: smartphones, tablets and smartwatches. Coincidentally or not, these are three of the four pillar categories of Apple (the waning fourth is the personal computer), and then we break down these numbers, their meanings and reasons.
Smartphones
In the world of the infamous pocket supercomputers, sales fell for the first time in history. It was a drop of 3% compared to the same period last year, it is not as drastic a decrease as the 16% of Apple, but it serves to illustrate that the problems in the market are not exclusive to Ma.
Samsung remains the leading smartphone manufacturer in the world, with 23.6% of market share, still followed by Apple, with 15.3%. It is good to note that both have lost a certain amount of participation, and the main culprits of this are on the other side of the world: Chinese companies (such as Huawei, OPPO and Xiaomi) are conquering the market quickly, as shown in the table above.
Tablets
Moving to slightly larger screens, the tablet world is still * no * doing very well, thanks, with the worst quarterly performance since 2012. The market retracted a terrifying 14.7%, from 46.4 million tablets sold in the first quarter from 2015 to 39.6 in the same period this year. a similar drop to that of Apple, which decreased 18.8%.
Ma, despite the fall, continues to lead the field of tablets with ease, with a market share 25.9% against 15.2% of the second place, Samsung.
Strategy Analytics and IDC note that, in this segment, the future is at low cost. Cheap tablets, such as those from Amazon (which grew a staggering 5.421% in the year) and Huawei, are attracting more and more interest from consumers, while their more expensive and elaborate brothers are received with less and less animation. Yellow sign for Apple.
Smartwatches
Things are more sunny in the tiny world of smartwatches but not so much for Apple. The sale of smart watches grew by 223% in the last year, which is understandable, considering the novelty of the segment. Apple, however, continues to lose ground to competitors equipped with Android Wear and Tizen: its market share fell from 63% in the first quarter of last year to 52% in the same period in 2016. And the trend is falling further, as other companies are improving their efforts and a new Apple Watch is launched.
Despite this, Ma is still the leader in the segment.
Strategy Analytics estimates that 2.2 million units of Apple Watch were sold in the first quarter of this year (Apple did not disclose the numbers), while the runner-up, Samsung, sold 600,000 smartwatches. To give you an idea, the same firm put the Apple Watch sales in the 4 million mark in its launch quarter.
(via Cult of Mac, Fortune, MacRumors)
