Smartphone Sales Fall 20.4 Pct Globally Amid Pandemic

Smartphone sales around the world dropped 20.4 percent in the second quarter, research and advisory firm Gartner said in a Tuesday (Aug. 25) press release. Global sales to end users arrived at 295 million units as the pandemic kept affecting the worldwide mobile phone sector.

Huawei and Samsung essentially tied for first place in worldwide smartphone sales, according to the release.

Nearly every significant market, excluding China, kept encountering some form of shelter-in-place limitation for much of Q2, bringing about sustained decreasing demand for smartphones, the release stated.

“The improved situation in China saw demand recovering quarter over quarter,” Gartner Senior Research Director Anshul Gupta said in the release. “Travel restrictions, retail closures and more prudent spending on nonessential products during the pandemic led to the second consecutive quarterly decline in smartphone sales this year.”

Huawei’s smartphone sales fell 6.8 percent and clocked in at 54 million units year on year, while Samsung’s smartphone sales dropped 27.1 percent year on year and totaled almost 55 million smartphones in Q2. And Apple sold 38 million iPhones in Q2, marking a fall of 0.4 percent year over year.

In China, smartphone sales dropped 7 percent in Q2, and almost 94 million phones were sold. By contrast, India notched the largest smartphone sales drop among the top five nations around the globe at 46 percent. India had experienced stringent restrictions and had gone so far as to limit online shopping.

As PYMNTS reported previously, shipments of smartphone devices in China dropped 16 percent in June in contrast to the same month a year prior per government figures, an indication that phone demand in the country with a 1.4 billion population remains tepid.

And, in March, consulting and research company Strategy Analytics unveiled a report that indicated that worldwide smartphone shipments fell 38 percent year on year in February 2020.

It was said to be the largest decline in smartphone sales in the history of the market at the time. The drop was attributed to the pandemic, which had nations throughout the globe on lockdown to stop the virus from spreading.