Smartphone Sales Keep Falling Despite 5G Development

The manufacturers of smartphones are now finding it just as difficult to achieve growing sales figures as other electronics manufacturers. The boom times are over and sales are currently falling.

The manufacturers actually hope that the new 5G networks will bring a boost – but this has not yet materialized. In the third quarter, consumers worldwide bought 366 million smartphones, 5.7 percent fewer than in the same period last year. At least that’s what the data collected from the producers by the market research company Gartner. If one adds the feature phones, 401 million devices were sold, which corresponds to a decrease of 8.7 percent.

The industry can, however, draw some hope. Because the crash is at least not continuing at the same pace as in the previous quarter, in which declines of over 20 percent were recorded. The big brands were essentially able to remain relatively stable – at least if they weren’t dealing with factors that went beyond the normal influences on the business.

Huawei crashes

The latter, of course, primarily concerned Huawei – and Xiaomi in parallel. Here one can basically summarize the development with the well-known “One man’s joy, one man’s pain”. The massive sanctions on the part of the US ensured that Huawei’s sales figures plummeted by 21.3 percent year-on-year in the last quarter. Basically, sales migrated completely to Xiaomi: The Chinese provider increased by 34.9 percent and was able to overtake Apple in third place.

At Apple, the sales figures remained almost stable with a minus of 0.6 percent – although the company started selling its new iPhone generation moved to the fourth quarter. With a slight plus of 2.2 percent, Samsung remained in first place in the world rankings by some distance.