Apple’s market share dropped in China: After having fallen out of the top five entirely earlier this year, it has been clawing its way back, but it is still losing a worrying amount of market share to growth from domestic brands Huawei, OPPO, Honor, and Xiaomi.
IDG and Canalys have confirmed that vivo was the top-selling company in Q3 2024, with huge increases in shipments by Huawei and Xiaomi, while their American counterpart couldn’t manage to repeat their own performance twelve months prior.
IDG reported that shipment of phones over (the equivalent of) $600 has increased to almost 30%, while the share of premium devices ($400-$600) had tumbled to 6.6%. On another note, the new trend of foldable smartphones witnessed a 13.6% yearly increase in shipment. Under this category of foldables, Huawei leads with 41% of all sales in Q3 followed by Honor with 21.9% market share. Xiaomi, Samsung, and Vivo complete the Top 5.
Some of the reasons causing Apple to lose market share are AI. Competitors have already implemented leading-edge AI features into their smartphones, unlike Apple, which even in its new iPhone 16 series, AI wasn’t available at launch. Apple Intelligence cannot currently launch in China—or, for that matter, in Europe—because it doesn’t currently meet the country’s very strict regulatory requirements around AI, one of the biggest problems being its heavy reliance on ChatGPT for some requests, which has been banned in China since February 2023.