Gartner recently revealed its new report for Smartphone Sales to End Users in Q1 2016 and the report gives us some interesting insights about the market status worldwide. So, unlike some other reports which gives us the shipment numbers, this is the actual number of units sold to end customers, which should give us a better picture of the market standings.

There are a few changes in the top smartphone vendors in the first quarter of this year, and it is not surprising that three Chinese smartphone manufacturers have got into the top 5 list, clearly showing their dominance in the market. Huawei, Xiaomi and OPPO have made it to the list for first quarter, but what’s really surprising is that OPPO is now above Xiaomi in terms of smartphone sales worldwide.

According to the new report, OPPO now sits in the fourth position in terms to total smartphone sales in Q1 2016. The company sold 16,112,600 smartphones in the earlier quarter, which is comfortably higher than Xiaomi’s 15,048,000 units sold in the same time period. What’s really impressive is the company’s growth rate. Last year, in the same time period, OPPO had sold just 6,585,100 phones, which means this year it marked a growth of a staggering 144.6%! At a time, when smartphone vendors are struggling to increase sales and market share, this is a tremendous achievement.

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On the other hand, Xiaomi’s growth has remained relatively stagnant. It managed to increase smartphone sales by just 2% as compared to the same quarter last year. This is the main reason why OPPO could overtake Xiaomi in the previous quarter.

The report also reveals that Huawei did pretty well in the first quarter of this year. With a market share of 8.3%, this Chinese giant is comfortably ahead of OPPO and Xiaomi. It sold 28,861,000 smartphones in the first quarter, which is much higher than what it sold in Q1 2015. The company is slowly reducing its gap with Apple and it looks like Huawei is on the path (although still a few years away) of reaching the top.

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In case you remember, Huawei CEO, Richard Yu had revealed that the company aims to overtake both Apple and Samsung in the next five years, and if it manages to sustain such high growth, this doesn’t look so impossible now. But despite its growth at this level, there’s still a long way to go, since Samsung sold a good 81,186,900 units in the first quarter, which is nearly three times of what Huawei sold in the same period.

Another interesting piece of information revealed by the report is the increasing gap between Android and iOS. Android’s market share grew from 78.8% in Q1 2015 to 84.1% in Q1 2016. On the other hand, iOS lost its market share in the past one year, going down from 17.9% to 14.8%. Windows, Blackberry and other operating systems hardly get 1% share of the market all together. Clearly shows the dominance of Android, and Apple to a certain extent.

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