China smartphone market to contract in 1Q21, says Digitimes Research
Sean Lin, DIGITIMES Research, Taipei
Smartphone shipments to the China market are anticipated to fall over 10% sequentially within the first quarter of 2021, after rising 19.2% within the fourth quarter of 2020, in line with Digitimes Research’s newest information from its smartphone tracker.
With China’s smartphone demand remaining weak within the fourth quarter of 2020 and key parts remaining in brief provide, smartphone shipments to the China market – regardless of an over 19% sequential progress – nonetheless dropped 10.5% on 12 months, wth whole-year 2020 volumes slipping 17.2% on 12 months, Digitimes Research’s figures present.
Honor, the smartphone model which Huawei offered to a Chinese government-backed consortium in 2020, launched new-generation smartphones in late January. With different first-tier manufacturers equivalent to Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi to additionally proceed keenly inserting orders and Huawei pushing to digest its remaining smartphone AP stock, the China smartphone market’s shipments will drop solely 12.5% sequentially within the first quarter of 2021 regardless of the quarter being the standard sluggish season.
Huawei’s smartphone shipments to the China market additional shrank within the fourth quarter of 2020, prompting its opponents to construct up part stock in a bid to take over Huawei’s misplaced market share.
However, the smartphone manufacturers nonetheless confronted critical shortages of parts together with APs, energy administration ICs and show driver ICs as a consequence of competitions from the PC and automotive sectors.
Apple’s iPhones took a serious share of the China smartphone market’s alternative demand and undermined shipments of Android-based smartphones within the fourth quarter of 2020. With the exception of Huawei, most Chinese first-tier Android smartphone manufacturers elevated the ratio of exports within the quarter, leading to weaker-than-expected growths of their home shipments.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, the top-5 smartphone manufacturers have been Huawei, Apple, Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi, collectively contributing 97.5% of the volumes to the China’s smartphone market, up barely by 0.3pp.
