Apple fans are loyal to the brand, but the loss of Google suite apps has hit Huawei hard according to the latest Kantar figures.
Market sales figures should always be taken with a grain of salt, but there’s some interesting data today out of Kantar Worldpanel when it comes to the smartphones that Australians were buying up to the end of 2019.
Globally speaking, it appears that the Apple iPhone 11 family has been a big hit for Apple, even more so than 2018’s iPhone crop. That’s a model that’s specifically repeated in Australia, where the iOS share of smartphone purchases jumped up by 3% to 43.7% in total. No wonder Apple is making money faster than it can tumble into Tim Cook’s spacious money bin.
Kantar’s figures suggest that the best selling model in Australia isn’t Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro Max, which, let’s face it isn’t exactly an inexpensive option. Instead, the entry level iPhone 11 was the biggest seller, making up 11.3% of sales. The entire iPhone 11 line accounted for 23.4%, meaning that over 20% of sales were for older iPhone generations.
Or in other words, Australians like cheaper iPhones, which bodes well if the rumours of a genuine low-cost iPhone coming soon actually pan out this time.
Kantar’s figures suggest that those upgrading to the iPhone 11 family are 89% made up of prior purchasers, so those older generation models are more likely to have been purchased by people switching over from Android.
You can’t gain market share without somebody else losing market share, and that has to come from the Android side of the fence. It’s still the overall dominant platform of choice, with 55.9% of sales, but that’s down from 59% for the same period 12 months ago.
It’s no huge shock to see where that drop has come from, with Huawei’s market share collapsing down to 3.5% from 7.2%. Clearly, putting out a phone with an exceptional camera but no Google services (even if it was via a bizarre “competition” sales method) didn’t work so well for the Chinese giant.
It’s not all doom and gloom on the ‘droid side of the fence, however. Just as there are (basically) only two smartphone OS choices out there, you might as well consider there to be just two smartphone brands, with Samsung’s local market share stated as rising to 30.7%.
Again though we appear to be tending more towards the budget end of the spectrum, with 50% of Samsung’s sales coming from its more affordable (but still quite excellent) Galaxy A phones.
It’s not exactly a surprise that fewer buyers were going to line up for the premium cost of the Galaxy Fold, of course, but it’l be interesting to see whether the presumably more affordable Galaxy Z Flip can reverse that perception.