China's August Smartphone Sales Hit 30 Million

Counterpoint Technology Market Research's latest survey shows that 30 million smartphones were sold in China during August. China’s smartphone market has now blown past the U.S. since it is almost three times larger after just matching it last year. (Note that my family and I own Apple shares).

Smartphones represented 91% of all phones sold, an all-time high. Additionally Counterpoint estimates that China’s 91% penetration rate is higher than the 87% that the U.S. reached during the same month.

Source: Counterpoint Monthly Market Pulse August 2013

Android captured 96% of the market

Led by Others at 45% (a lot of low-cost vendors such as Xiaomi and a number of which won’t survive two years from now), Samsung at 15%, Huawei at 11% and other Chinese vendors Android had a 96% share of the smartphone market in August.

The domestic vendors had over 75% share due to sub-$200 smartphones being the product of choice and being reinforced by operator subsidies shifting to low and mid-priced handsets.

Nokia accounted for about 3% of the market with the Lumia 520 helping and Apple was almost non-existent at 1%.

Source: Counterpoint Monthly Market Pulse August 2013

Anticipation of a lower priced iPhone significantly hit Apple’s sales

Counterpoint has Apple barely showing up at 1% share due to people waiting for the new iPhones to be announced. IDC has Apple’s share at about 6%-7% and Kantar which has measured market share in “Urban China” had Apple’s share at 20.8% in August on a three month rolling average. Apple’s share will increase with the 5c and 5s now being available, and months earlier than previous new iPhone launches. However with the 5c not priced anywhere close to the sweet spot of the Chinese market its market share will rebound but probably not become one of the top 3 vendors.

Source: Kantar Worldpanel ComTech survey

China Mobile will be the wild card on Apple significantly increasing its market share. China Mobile now has over 750 million subscribers and is in the midst of rolling out a 4G LTE network. From the 200,000 base stations that it will have in place by year end I expect Apple to partner with it by the end of the year or first half next year. There was also a picture of a China Mobile poster that indicated that testing of Apple’s 5c and 5s would occur in September and October.

I have developed a Google Doc that has subscriber numbers for China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom available at this link.

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