The coronavirus outbreak has shown its negative impact on the smartphone market last month and it looks like Huawei has been badly hit especially with the on-going restrictions by the US Government. According to Strategy Analytics, Huawei has slide to #4 position in terms of global shipments and the Chinese smartphone giant has been overtaken by Xiaomi.
For the month of February 2020, Xiaomi has shipped a total of 6.0 million phones worldwide, while Huawei only shipped 5.5 million units. As a comparison, Xiaomi had shipped 10.0 million units while Huawei shipped 12.2 million units in January 2020.
Samsung is still #1 with 18.2 million units shipped, followed by Apple with 10.2 million units. Like other smartphone makers, both brands also suffer a decline in shipments at 9.4% and 36% respectively.
Overall global smartphone shipments have suffered a sharp decline of 38% YoY from 99.2 million units in February 2019 to 61.8 million units in February 2020. The decline is mainly due to the disruption of the supply chain and also slower consumer demand due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
“February 2020 saw the biggest fall ever in the history of the worldwide smartphone market. Supply and demand of smartphones plunged in China, slumped across Asia, and slowed in the rest of the world. It is a period the smartphone industry will want to forget.” – Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics.
It is expected that smartphone shipments will continue to decline in the coming months as the COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly in more countries outside of China especially Europe.
According to the last update by Malaysia’s Ministry of Health, there are over 275,000 COVID-19 cases worldwide with over 11,000 deaths. In Italy, there are over 47,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths, which is higher China’s death toll.
