In an interesting reversal of trends in the past few months, the US has reoriented itself towards Android while Europe is still seeing strong Apple sales.
In a period of time of three months, ending in May of this year, Android has seen its momentum return, at least in the US, where the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S6 nudged the operating system’s market share back up. Android now accounts, for 64.9% of smartphones in the US, almost 3% higher than a month earlier. Meanwhile, Apple saw its share decline by 2.4% mainly due to market saturation, keeping iOS at 30% market share. Windows Phone also declined by 0.3% compared to April, giving Microsoft a meager 3.5% of the market.
In Europe all of these trends are reversed. Despite the launch of the Galaxy S6, sales did not pick up for Android, which lost almost 3% compared to this time last year, though it remained stable compared to April. Meanwhile Apple saw some growth at 18.7% of the market, up more than two percentage points relative to May 2014, though there’s actually a small decline if you look sequentially and compare this data to the April report. Windows Phone also followed this same trend, ending May with 9.5% of the market share across the big 5 EU countries, a tiny increase compared to April.
Overall the markets seem fairly stable across these saturated economies. The story is a bit different in China where Apple, Xiaomi and Huawei are battling for first place in sales inside of urban markets. Though, of course Android is still the overall winner with more than 75% of the market using either Google’s OS or AOSP.
With the launch of a new generation of iPhones expected this fall, it will be interesting to see if the Cupertino-based company can recreate its recent success and push its market share even further, or whether Samsung has finally got its game back together and is ready to steamroll anything in its path.
Source: Kantar WorldPanel
4 Comments - Add comment