While not quite a duopoly, Apple and Samsung have long been known to produce the most popular smartphones from a global perspective. Over the past years, however, Chinese tech companies have started catching up and, at times, even overtaking Apple's iPhone product lines.
In the following chart, based on data from the IDC Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Statista's Florian Zandt shows that between January and March 2024, roughly one out of five of the 289 million smartphones shipped were Samsung devices, while Apple commanded a market share of 17.3 percent. Xiaomi, however, wasn't far behind with a 14.1 percent share in the market translating to around 41 million smartphones shipped in the first quarter of the year.
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Rounding out the four smartphone vendors with the highest amount of devices shipped is Transsion, which produced every tenth smartphone sold in the first three months of 2024. Although the Chinese company entered IDC's top 5 for the first time in the second quarter of 2023, it's been around since 2006. Its devices have become increasingly popular in emerging markets like the African continent.
Looking at smartphone vendor market share over time, Apple and Samsung have been on top for most of the first quarters since 2014. The notable exception is Huawei, which rose to prominence in the latter half of the 2010s and even managed to overtake Samsung for the best-selling smartphone brand worldwide in the second quarter of 2020 after already coming within 3.3 percentage points in the three months prior.
Huawei's rise was abruptly halted by the end of 2020, reportedly due to the increasing pressure of U.S. sanctions on the company. Its shoes were quickly filled by its Chinese competitors Xiaomi and Oppo, which had combined market shares ranging from 22 to 25 percent in the first quarters of 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
