China and India haven’t been the most fertile territories for Apple in terms of handset sales in recent years, but somehow, the Cupertino-based tech giant managed to gain quite a bit of ground in both these very important markets during a quarter that only saw a new iPhone release at its end.
Is Vivo becoming a global threat?
After Huawei’s staggering year-on-year decline from 30 to 8 percent Chinese market share, Vivo has moved into first place, edging out sister brand Oppo with a healthy 23 percent slice of the pie, compared to 20 percent for the BBK-owned silver medalist.
Perhaps more impressively, Vivo grabbed India’s bronze medal for the July – September 2021 timeframe as well, beating everyone from Realme and Oppo to Apple and OnePlus. The Chinese champion was number one in India’s offline channel, as well as the 5G segment, further demonstrating its potential to challenge Samsung and Apple’s global supremacy relatively soon.
The iPhone 13 series should further boost Apple’s figures in Q4
Obviously, that made Apple the nation’s highest growing brand (by far), and things were not radically different in China either, where Cupertino’s 48 percent year-on-year progress was only surpassed by Realme’s surge from 0 to 4 percent market share.
Both Honor and Xiaomi deserve honorable mentions (no pun intended) for their latest Chinese sales results, ranking third and fourth overall respectively while posting healthy quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth… respectively.
