Earlier today a report by China Daily claimed that Apple's sales were down in China while OPPO took the crown in market share. More specifically, the report claimed that market researcher Counterpoint reported that "China's smartphone maker OPPO beat Apple to take the first spot in June with 22.9 percent of market share.It's the first time that the domestic phone maker won the race against Apple and Huawei."

Earlier this month Patently Apple posted a report titled "Apple's iPhone Status has dropped to Number Five in Greater China." For just the month of May, Apple had fallen to number five with local brands Huawei, Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi now taking the top four smartphone spots in Greater China with a combined market share of 53 percent.

It was in April of this year when we first witnessed the surprising surge of OPPO coming out of nowhere to take the number four spot.

Without a doubt, Apple's iPhone is having a tough 2016 thus far. But in the Premium smartphone category, Apple's iPhone remains the runaway winner as noted in the Counterpoint chart below.

Here Apple has about 42% of the Premium Price Band (+$400 smartphones) and OPPO has roughly 12%. So when it comes to the top end of the market and profits, Apple is still number one in the industry and in China. The stats would strongly suggest that OPPO's recent gains for June are in the very low end of the market where profits are slim to none. So OPPO is king of statistics for useless volume: Yawn.

A year ago we reported that Apple made 92% of the smartphone market's profits. It'll be interesting to review this again when the statistics are updated for 2016.

OPPO is another Chinese OEM that mirrors Apple's designs both in Hardware and software. Our cover graphic shows an OPPO smartphone homepage with the same styled icons as Apple even to mirroring actual icons like Settings, Contacts, messages and more. Below is the gold color and antenna lines to give the overall feel of an iPhone.

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