Samsung has had a great couple of years, however, it seems as though that might be about to change, with the company having announced its first ever drop in annual smartphone sales.
The decline in sales was reported by TrendForce, which said that it expected smartphone sales from the South Korean company to be down one percent from last year.
This is a pretty big deal for the company, which has become one of the most popular smartphone sellers in the world with its Galaxy line and has battled with Apple over the years for the title of the biggest smartphone seller in the world.
Of course, the decline isn't totally unexpected. Samsung smartphone sales and market share have both been slowing in their growth over the past few years, largely because of increased competition by Chinese smartphone manufacturers like Huawei and Xiaomi. Not only that, but Samsung's latest flagship devices, the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, have largely failed to turn the company's fortunes around, despite offering a total redesign.
In total, TrendForce estimates that Samsung will sell 40 million Galaxy S series smartphones this year, as well as around 10 million units of the Galaxy Note 5. Including the S series, Galaxy Note series and everything else, it is expected that Samsung will sell around 323.5 million smartphones this year.
Huawei, however, is on the rise, and has so far shipped 100 million smartphones, making it the first Chinese smartphone manufacturer to do so. In total, Huawei is expected to grow by 40 percent over last year.
Of course, even though Samsung's sales are in decline, the company still sits atop the smartphone industry with a market share of 24.6 percent, at least for the third quarter of 2015.
Worldwide smartphone shipments will likely grow by around 9.3 percent in total this year, however, that's expected to go down 7.7 percent in 2016. This is because of the fact that markets like the U.S. and Europe have become saturated over the past few years, meaning there are fewer first-time smartphone buyers.
Via: Cnet
