Samsung, Apple and Xiaomi command half of the global smartphone market so far this year

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According to Statista, while not quite a duopoly, Apple and Samsung have long been known to produce the most popular smartphones from a global perspective. Over the past years, however, Chinese tech companies have started catching up and, at times, even overtaking the product lines of both the South Korean and the U.S. phone manufacturers.

The chart above is based on data from the IDC Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker showing, that between April and June 2024, around 19 percent of the 285 million smartphones shipped were Samsung devices, while Apple commanded a market share of 15.8 percent. Xiaomi, however, wasn’t far behind with a 14.7 percent share in the market, translating to around 42 million smartphones shipped in the second quarter of the year.

Rounding out the five smartphone vendors with the highest amount of devices shipped are Vivo and Oppo, which tied at around nine percent market share in Q2 2024. Transsion, which produced every tenth smartphone sold in the first three months of 2024, dropped out of the top five in the period from April to June. The Chinese company entered IDC’s top 5 for the first time in the second quarter of 2023. Its devices have become increasingly popular in emerging markets like the African continent.

Looking at smartphone vendor market share over time, Apple and Samsung have been on top for most of the second quarters since 2014. Exceptions to this rule are Xiaomi and Huawei, the latter of which rose to prominence in the latter half of the 2010s and even managed to overtake Samsung for the best-selling smartphone brand worldwide in the second quarter of 2020 after already coming within 3.3 percentage points in the three months prior.

Huawei’s rise was abruptly halted by the end of 2020, reportedly due to the increasing pressure of U.S. sanctions on the company. Its shoes were quickly filled by its Chinese competitors Xiaomi and Oppo, which had combined market shares ranging from 22 to 27 percent in the second quarters of 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.