Today Gartner released their statistical report on Q2 global smartphones that slightly differs from the IDC report on this same subject matter that we covered back on August first. Gartner states that Apple's market share decline was 1.4% versus IDC's accounting of 2%.

Global sales of smartphones to end users declined 1.7% in the second quarter of 2019, totaling 368 million units, according to Gartner, Inc. Samsung Smartphone Sales returned to growth after six consecutive quarterly declines

Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner stated for the report that "Demand for high-end smartphones has slowed at a greater rate than demand for midrange and low-end smartphones."

We reported on this at the end of July in a report titled "Both Apple and Samsung are Seeing the trend of consumers choosing Lower-End Smartphone models."

Samsung has already sprung into action to address this new trend with the release of their new A-Series of smartphones with excellent specifications for the price. Of course Samsung currently restricts their A-Series smartphones to Asian markets where they are battling all of China's top OEMs such as Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi.

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Apple is unlikely to follow Samsung's pricing strategy in Asia and continue to rely on the iPhone XR model to address this recent mid-market trend. Thus far the strategy has done well for them in the U.S. and Urban China.

More specifically, Apple's iPhone XR was the best Selling Smartphone in the U.S. in Q2 with a Whopping 48% Market Share. Whether Apple will do more in this segment to fight off the competition in China next month is unknown at this time.

Gartner's Gupta further states in the report that "Among the top five global smartphone vendors, Huawei and Samsung exhibited the strongest annual sales increases in the second quarter of 2019 at 16.5% and 3.8%, respectively (see Table 1 below). As a result, they both grew market share in the quarter, which led them to account for more than a third of total smartphone sales globally."

Apple is placed third on the chart below with China's Xiaomi not far behind in fourth position.

As for Apple, Gupta weighed in by stating that "Sales of iPhones continued to decline year over year, although at a lesser rate compared with the first quarter of 2019. Apple sold just over 38 million iPhones in the second quarter, a 13.8% decline year over year. Too few incremental benefits are preventing existing iPhone users from replacing their smartphones. Apple has reached an inflection point marked by shifting its business toward services, which represented 21% of the vendor’s total revenue in the first quarter of 2019."

Apple's CEO stated during his opening Q3 Financial Conference call that "For iPhone, we generated $26 billion in revenue. While this is down 12% from last year's June quarter, it is a significant improvement to the 17% year-over-year decline in Q2. We're encouraged by the results we're seeing from the initiatives that we spoke about in January, including strong customer response to our in-store trade-in and financing programs.

Cook further noted that "In fact, iPhone in our retail and online stores, returned to growth on a year-over-year basis in the month of June. Our active installed base of iPhone reached a new all-time high and was up year over year in each of our top 20 markets underscoring the quality of our products and the satisfaction and loyalty of iPhone customers around the world."

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