Xiaomi seems to be becoming a threat to Samsung’s position as the world’s largest smartphone company. Huawei used to be a big threat to Samsung until the US ban caused the brand to fall into oblivion. Will Xiaomi succeed when Huawei fails and dethrone Samsung?
Xiaomi’s growth is no accident. Xiaomi benefited from Huawei’s near disappearance from markets outside of China, along with Samsung’s pandemic production problems, which helped Xiaomi overtake Apple in the second quarter and come in second behind Samsung, but This victory may not last.
Samsung won’t face production problems forever, and the situation seems to have improved somewhat in Q3 as the tech giant took steps to address it. Coincidentally, that was also when Apple regained second place from Xiaomi.
The chart below shows the top three smartphone brands each quarter since 2012. Samsung dominates most of them, indicated by a blue bubble with an “S”.
Samsung has been leading the market most of the time since 2012. Apple has won a series of “silver medals”, but the 3rd place is constantly changing. At one point it belonged to ZTE, then Huawei and LG competed for the “bronze medal” until Huawei won. Huawei then competed for 2nd place with Apple for several quarters and now Xiaomi seems to be replacing Huawei.
Despite all the contention over positions, Samsung is still the leader in the global smartphone market and analysts believe that Samsung will still hold the position for the foreseeable future. Like in the past, some will occasionally overtake Samsung for a few quarters, but that won’t be enough to threaten its dominance in the global smartphone market.
Reference: CounterPoint Research
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