Research firm Gartner has published its analysis for smartphone sales to end users in the second quarter of this year, reporting that while they grew 13.5% year-on-year to 330m units, that’s the slowest growth rate since 2013. Why? In a word: China, responsible for 30% of global sales but a country where Gartner says the smartphone market has reached “saturation”.
The company’s figures also reinforce the sense of the smartphone world as a two-horse race, albeit where one of the horses is much bigger than the other by sales. 271m Android smartphones were sold in the second quarter, giving Google an 82.2% share of the market. That’s actually down from 83.8% this time last year, with Apple selling 48.1m iPhones in the quarter, seeing its market share rise from 12.2% to 14.6%. It’s then a long drop to the 8.2m Windows Phones sold in Q2 for a 2.5% share, while BlackBerry remains rock-bottom of the (formerly) major platforms, with 1.2m sales and a 0.3% share.
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