Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it wasn’t exactly shocking to see global smartphone sales decline last year compared to 2019, but after the mobile industry started to recover during the final quarter of 2020, not many people expected the market to contract once again as early as Q3 2021.
Unfortunately for the vast majority of top handset vendors, the “chipset famine” arrived to cause OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) even more trouble than the deadly virus that halted all smartphone production activity in many countries last year.
No big changes at the top of the vendor table
Of course, an important shift did take place between Q3 2020 and Q3 2021, as Huawei, which was last year’s silver medalist, is now nowhere to be found among the world’s five biggest smartphone manufacturers.
While Canalys is not ready to reveal any specific unit shipment figures for the purposes of this new report, it’s definitely interesting to note that Apple registered the biggest market share gain among these five major companies, jumping from 12 to a 15 percent slice of the pie since last year’s third calendar quarter.
Apple’s profit and revenue supremacy is as towering as always
Believe it or not, that 75 percent slice of the pie is lower than the 86 percent profit share registered by Apple at its Q4 2020 peak while easily eclipsing the 51 percent number reported in Q3 2020, which was the last time Samsung got (relatively) close to the world heavyweight champion.
Obviously, the gap between Apple and Samsung in the smartphone revenue hierarchy is not quite as dramatic, but Counterpoint’s, well, point stands, as the industry shift was not really significant from that standpoint in the last few years either.
