Fierce competition
The large smartphone market in China also led to fierce competition among various manufacturers. Apple and Samsung were leading market players since the beginning of the smartphone trend, but had been gradually losing market share to domestic smartphone makers in China like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi. In the third quarter of 2022, while the Apple shipped over 12 million units in the beginning of the year, the shipment volume of iPhones decreased to approximately ten million units. The Chinese companies have long left the low-price segment and are producing more and more high-end smartphones with considerable success. They benefited from a rich local smartphone manufacturing and design ecosystem, which allows them to compete with foreign smartphone brands.In terms of operating system market share, the Chinese market was dominated by Google’s Android smartphone OS. Together with Apple’s iOS, the two systems occupied about 99 percent of the market by the end of 20221, while the market share of SymbianOS had almost vanished from 39 percent at the beginning of 2012 to only 0.01 percent by the end of 2016.