The folks at Analysys International (not to be confused with Analysys – although both are tech and telecom consultancies) in Beijing send us interesting info-snippets from time to time. Today, they sent us their figures for China’s handset market in the third quarter.
They say that sales volume of mobile phones reached 37.43 million units in the third quarter, growing 7.4% over the last quarter. Then there’s a breakdown by brand.
Nokia has a whopping 35.1% of the market, more than double its closest rival, Motorola, with 13.6%. Samsung is third with about 11.6%. Interestingly, the only Chinese handset maker to break the top five is Lenovo, surely better known for their desktops and laptops, with a rather paltry 6.1%.
Low-cost local handset maker Bird has slightly more than half Lenovo’s share, with 3.7%, while Haier has 1.2%. Chinese brands certainly seem to be struggling based on the absolute numbers, although I’m not sure what the trends are like.
Shockingly, Sony Ericsson is way down the list, with about 4%, while LG has 2.7%. With the amount of advertising those companies seem to spend (at least in Shanghai), you might think they’d have more share. But again, they may only be interested in the rich, urban areas, which would account for their poor numbers on the national level.
Those figures are for both GSM and CDMA handsets combined. When you break out just CDMA handsets, Huawei is neck and neck with Samsung, with 24.4% and 25.6% of the market respectively.