Three companies dominate the global smartphone market – Samsung, Apple and Huawei. So, who is winning in the Samsung vs iPhone vs Huawei matchup? We can just take a look at the sales figures and the companies’ market share and determine which company sells more units, but that’s just one aspect of the matter.
We can also compare the latest and most powerful versions of the three smartphones produced by these three giants and see which has better features and better performance.
Samsung – the most selling smartphone of 2019
So, perhaps the best way to start our Samsung vs iPhone vs Huawei analysis is by looking at the Samsung numbers. The first version of the Samsung Galaxy was released back in 2010. It was designed to be a direct competitor of the iPhone, in fact it even looked a lot like the iPhone.
In the first few years, the Galaxy didn’t come close to the iPhone in terms of sales. By the third quarter of 2012, Samsung sold as many units as Apple. Since then, Samsung regularly sells more units than Apple, with few exceptions. There’s one market where Samsung can’t compete with Apple, that’s US and generally speaking North America where Apple still reigns supreme.
One look at the sales figures for the previous, 2019, will paint a rather interesting picture. Here, we will see Samsung pretty much dominated most of the year, by beating its competitors by at least few percent in every quarter, except for the last quarter when something rather strange happened.
Apple rules the US
The iPhone wasn’t even the second most sold smartphone in 2019. In fact, the American company was behind not just the Korean giant Samsung, but it was also behind the Chinese smartphone developer Huawei. Or at least, that’s what happened during most of the year. Things changed during the last quarter, when Apple was the best performing company, managing to sell more units than Huawei, but also Samsung.
If you look at the market share percentages it would seem that Samsung vs iPhone vs Huawei was a draw, at least as far as the firs two are concerned, but even though Samsung and Apple both stood at 18%, Samsung sold more than Apple, with the latter managing to sell about 73 million iPhones, whereas Samsung sold about 70 million Galaxy units.
If we look just the US market, Apple actually reigns supreme, managing to sell between 39% and 49% in the respective quarters of 2019. The iPhone XR was the most sold in the US in 2019 with a market share of 16%, 15% and 13% for the first, second and third quarter of the year, respectively.