Spoiler alert: mid-range is king

We’re still in China for Huawei’s media tour, and one part of the company’s media orientation program is to familiarize us with some of the smartphone trends that is happening in Huawei’s home country, courtesy of GfK China.

While most people think of the Chinese market as the land of cheap smartphones (and therefore lower-end sales), GfK’s data indicate that most smartphone sales occur in the RMB 1000 (Php 7.7K) to RMB 2000 (Php 15.4K) price band, with around 31% of all smartphone sales in Q3 2017 falling in that particular category. 28% of all smartphone sales in the same period occurred in RMB 2000 (Php 15.4K) to RMB 3000 (Php 23.2K) category, which indicates that in China, the mid-range market is king. This explains the success of OPPO, Vivo and Huawei in this particular part of the world, which the three brands have been trying to replicate here in the Philippines.

For the first half of 2017, Huawei has managed to dominate the sales charts in China. According to GfK’s data, Huawei currently holds around 21.7% of the market share in China, followed by OPPO at 17.1%, Vivo at 16.1%, Apple at 11.1% and Xiaomi at 10.2%. Samsung is a distant 8th place at 2.7%, following Meizu sitting pretty at 6th place with 3.8% and Gionee at 7th with 3.4% of the market. Interestingly, GfK says that there’s around 1000 mobile phone brands in China!

We saw other nuggets of wisdom in GfK’s presentation. One is the fact that a majority of phones sold in the RMB 2000 (Php 15.4K) to RMB 3000 (Php 23.2K) price category have 5-inch to 5.5-inch displays, while phones in the RMB 3000 (Php 23.2K) to RMB 4000 (Php 30.9K) price band tend to have 5.5-inch to 6-inch displays. Also, most phones (99.7%) sold at around the RMB 2500 price band (Php 19.3K) have fingerprint scanners built-in, with that number going down to 78.9% at the RMB 1000 (Php 7.7K) to RMB 2500 (Php 19.3K) price band.

As far smartphone trends go, you’ll be seeing more 18:9 aspect ratio equipped phones as the days go on, with that particular feature fast becoming the de-facto standard for flagships moving forward. More phones will also develop face scanning and iris-scanning tech in the future.