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 2020, while the Chinese domestic brand Huawei ranked first with a shipment volume of about 35 million units, the shipment volume of iPhone dropped to approximately seven million units, which was less than half of the peak of around 17 million five years ago. 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 OS. Together with Apple’s iOS, the two systems occupied about 99 percent of the market by March 2021, 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.

User perspective

The outstanding development of the smartphone market in China is closely associated with the increasing popularity of mobile smartphone usage in the country. The majority of China’s netizens use a smartphone as their primary means of going online. Like the trend worldwide, Chinese are also relying on their smartphone more and more. According to a survey on internet use, the average daily time spent with non-voice mobile activities by adults in China was estimated to reach 160 minutes by 2020.

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