Apple and Samsung are struggling to remain competitive in the Chinese smartphone market as local players continue to dominate. According to data from CounterPoint Research, the smartphone market in China grew by 3% between April and June 2017.
As we see in this chart from Statista, Chinese brands like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi expanded their dominance and now account for 87% of the market. Samsung and Apple both lost ground.
The big winner continues to be Huawei, which saw demand for its Nova and P10 models continue to grow. The big loser is Samsung, which saw its share of the market trimmed to 3%. The battery issues with Samsung’s Galaxy 7 damaged the company’s reputation, and its mid tier phones faced tough competition from Chinese brands.