Xiaomi’s online-only-flash-sale strategy of selling cheap & feature-rich smartphones has paid off. In a time-frame of 2 years, they have gone from no-where to become the 3rd largest smartphone company in the world according to the latest IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report.
While Samsung still remains at the top, their market share has come down considerably from 32.5% in 2013Q3 to just 23.8% in 2014Q3, a fall of 8.7 percentage points.
Xiaomi shipped 17.3 million smartphones in the third quarter of 2014 compared to 5.6 million in the corresponding quarter last year – A growth of whopping 211.3 percent. Comparatively, Samsung shipped 78.1 million units as compared to 85 million last year!
While Apple performed marginally well growing its quarterly sale from 33.8 million last year to 39.3 million shipments in 3rd quarter of 2014. However, even they lost market share, which came down from 12.19 percent to 12 percent.
Overall, all Smartphone vendors combined shipped 327.6 million units compared to 261.7 million in Q3 of last year registering a growth of 25.2 percent. This is the record number of units shipped compared to any of the previous quarters.
Among other smartphone vendors, the IDC report showed that Lenovo was tied for fourth position with LG, as its results improved on steady gains at home and abroad with the share of non-China shipments rising steadily to hit 20% in 3Q14, up from 9% a year ago. Sub-US$100 smartphones like the A369i and A316 drove volumes from emerging markets in Asia/Pacific and the Middle East and Africa.
LG’s strategy to court the market with low-cost smartphones has paid enough dividends to push its total volumes past the 15 million unit mark for the first time in the company’s history. Its F-and L-series smartphones have earned a warm reception, within both emerging and developed markets. At the same time, LG released its flagship G3 to maintain a presence in the high-end of the market, lifting the company’s overall LTE footprint.
With Xiaomi planning to launch Redmi Note 2 in China and other countries, and also plans to launch its 2014 flagship Mi 4 and Note in India, the sales volume are expected to further grow for them. Given the way Xiaomi is growing, we would not be surprised if Xiaomi beats Apple in sales volumes by next year same quarter
[IDC Report]