Late this afternoon Gartner released their global shipment report on smartphones for Q1 2020. Overall the market shrunk by 20.2% in the first quarter of 2020 obviously due to COVID-19's global shelter-in-place reality. Considering how Apple's competitors were hit so hard this quarter, Apple's decline almost looked like a victory.

Anshul Gupta, senior research analyst at Gartner: "The coronavirus pandemic caused the global smartphone market to experience its worst decline ever. Most of the leading Chinese manufacturers and Apple were severely impacted by the temporary closures of their factories in China and reduced consumer spending due to the global shelter-in-place."

Samsung, Huawei and Oppo Recorded Worst Performances of Top Five Smartphone Vendors with double digit losses. In that light Apple's slight drop by 8.2% seemed like a victory.

Annette Zimmermann, research vice president at Gartner: "Apple had a strong start to the year thanks to its new product line up that saw strong momentum globally. If COVID-19 did not happen, the vendor would have likely seen its iPhone sales reached record level in the quarter.

Supply chain disruptions and declining consumer spending put a halt to this positive trend in February. Apple’s ability to serve clients via its online stores and its production returning to near normal levels at the end of March helped recover some of the early positive momentum." For details about the other smartphone vendors, review the full Gartner report.

For some added color for the quarter, review our April 29th report titled "In Calendar Q1 Apple did Exceedingly Well in India and especially China where the iPhone 11 was the number one Smartphone."