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In a first, China’s smartphone market declines by 4 per cent in 2017 Canalys.
China’s smartphone market saw its first ever annual decline as shipments fell 4 per cent in the year 2017, according to a report shared by research firm Canalys . China is considered the world’s largest smartphone market and one of the most important, but has seen declining  growth in the last couple of quarters. According to Canalys, shipments for smartphones stood at 459 million units in China for all of 2017.

The research firm points out that the reason for this was also the poor fourth quarter in 2017 where China’s smartphone shipments were down by nearly 14 per cent. Canalys called the fourth quarter as the worst in terms of year-on-year performance for the market as shipments dropped by more than 14 per cent to just under 113 million units.

In terms of individual vendors and how they performed in Q4, 2017, Huawei managed to do well in the shrinking market and saw shipments grow by nearly 9 per cent. The company shipped 24 million units of smartphones and remains on top in its home market. But there was bad news for other homegrown players like Oppo and Vivo, both of whom saw shipments fall by 16 per cent and 7 per cent respectively. However, the two vendors are still number two and number three in the China smartphone market.

Oppo’s shipments stood at 19 million smartphones, while Vivo shipped 17 million for the quarter. Finally, Apple was at number four in the market with 13 million units shipped in Q4. According to Canalys, Apple shipped around 7 million, iPhone X units to the China market alone. Xiaomi was down to number five in its home market.