Apple beat Samsung to take top spot amongst smartphone vendors in the fourth quarter of 2020. Indeed, it was second overall in 2020, according to data from Gartner, surpassing Huawei.
Apple Into Second Place With 2020 Smartphone Sales
In Q4 2020, Apple sold 79.9 million iPhones, a 14.9 increase form the same time the year before. Meanwhile, Samsung sold 62.1 million smartphones. Despite the 11.8 percent year-on-year decline for Q4, Samsung topped the charts for 2020 as a whole, selling 253 million devices compared to Apple’s 199.8 million. This marked a 14.6 percent year-on-year decline for Samsung and a 3.3 percent increase for Apple. Huawei, which dropped to third, saw its 2020 sales fall by 24.1 percent compared to 2019.
The market itself saw a decline of 5.4 percent for the last three months of 2020, and 12.5 percent for the full year. Commenting on the findings, Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner, said:
The sales of more 5G smartphones and lower-to-mid-tier smartphones minimized the market decline in the fourth quarter of 2020. Even as consumers remained cautious in their spending and held off on some discretionary purchases, 5G smartphones and pro-camera features encouraged some end users to purchase new smartphones or upgrade their current smartphones in the quarter.