Las ventas de iPhone aumentan en Japón y caen en China

There’s good news and bad for Apple in two different market intelligence reports. One points to Apple’s market share rising and continuing to utterly dominate the Japanese smartphone market, while the other describes a dramatic slump in iPhone sales in China.

When it comes to Japan, it’s long been the case that there’s Apple, and then, a long way behind, there’s everyone else …

In Japan, IDC indicates that Apple continued to enjoy a second quarter of market share growth, the final quarter of last year seeing it return to account for more than half of all smartphone sales in the country.

The nearest competitor, Sharp, lagged way behind Apple’s 51.9% share, at just 10.9%.

In China, however, Huawei’s surprise – and still largely unexplained – comeback has seen iPhone sales fall 24% year-on-year in the first six weeks of the year, according to the latest Counterpoint data. Huawei saw its own sales climb by 64% in the same period.

Apple’s iPhone struggled during the first few weeks of the year for several reasons. “Primarily, it faced stiff competition at the high end from a resurgent Huawei while getting squeezed in the middle on aggressive pricing from the likes of OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi,” said Senior Analyst Mengmeng Zhang, adding, “Although the iPhone 15 is a great device, it has no significant upgrades from the previous version, so consumers feel fine holding on to the older-generation iPhones for now.”

The firm does note that, additionally, it was a tough compare for Apple.

It may be noted that the first six weeks of 2023 saw abnormally high numbers with significant unit sales being deferred from December 2022 due to production issues, magnifying the negative YoY comparison.

Photo by Andre Benz on Unsplash