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Samsung bounces back, smartphone sales up: Gartner

New Delhi, Aug 27

Samsung sold over 75 million smartphones globally in the second quarter (Q2) 2019 and grew its share by 1.1 percentage points (year over year) after witnessing a decline in six consecutive quarters, Gartner said on Tuesday.

Strong demand for Samsung's new Galaxy A series smartphones and the revamp of its entire entry-level and mid-range smartphone range helped this positive performance.

"Demand for Samsung's flagship Galaxy S10 started to weaken during the quarter, however, indicating that achieving growth in 2019 as a whole will be a challenge," said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. 

Global sales of smartphones to end-users declined 1.7 per cent in the second quarter, totaling 368 million units.

"Demand for high-end smartphones has slowed at a greater rate than demand for midrange and low-end smartphones," Gupta added.

"To try to boost smartphone replacements, we've seen manufacturers bringing premium features such as multi-lens front/back cameras, bezel-less displays and large batteries from their flagship smartphones into lower-priced models," he noted.

Among the top five global smartphone vendors, Huawei and Samsung exhibited the strongest annual sales increases in the second quarter of 2019 -- at 16.5 per cent and 3.8 per cent, respectively. 

They accounted for more than a third of total smartphone sales globally.

Sales of iPhones continued to decline year over year, although at a lesser rate compared with the first quarter of 2019. 

Apple sold just over 38 million iPhones in the second quarter, a 13.8 per cent decline year over year. 

"Too few incremental benefits are preventing existing iPhone users from replacing their smartphones," said Gupta." 

Among the top five countries in smartphones sales, China held the top position with 101 million smartphone sales in the second quarter of 2019, up 0.5 per cent year over year. 

India sold a total of 35.7 million smartphones, achieving market share of 9.7 per cent in the second quarter of 2019. 

Those sales in India represented a 2.3 per cent decline year over year, however, mainly due to slowing consumer upgrades from feature phones to smartphones.

Global smartphone sales will remain weak for the rest of the year. 

Gartner expects that sales of worldwide smartphone sales to end-users will total 1.5 billion units in 2019.