China becomes the world’s largest smartphone market

It was to be expected: in the third quarter of 2011, China became the largest smartphone market in the world, ahead of the United States and Europe.

China has for a long time been the world’s largest mobile phone market – and what a market! With the 1 billion mobile phone subscriptions mark to soon be broken. The country did take longer to see 3G arrive though (the Chinese government reorganised their telecom market around their three major players - China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, before awarding the 3G licenses in 2009) leaving the country a long way behind with smartphones.

Now that the infrastructure is operational, with the country coexisting with three 3G standards (WCDMA, CDMA2000 and TD-SCDMA) and the development of 4G with TD-LTE also being well underway, China has quickly made up for lost ground with smartphone sales being the envy of the west.


China moves ahead of the United States
According to research group Strategy Analytics, the third quarter of 2011 saw China become the largest smartphones market in the world on volume, moving ahead of the United States and Europe for the first time.

23.9 million Smartphones were sold in the country in this period, compared to 23.3 million in the United States. While the volume of devices being shipped in China is now well established, the value is still not there for manufacturers.

China has made great progress thanks to the lower prices of top end phones and the release of numerous low cost smartphone models by ZTE, Huawei and Lenovo. Nokia, who has been present in the market for a long time, is still the leading manufacturer with 28% market share, followed by the South Korean Samsung. Local manufacturers are starting to show their presence though, thanks to Android and Android based OS’s, with this likely to change the landscape in the medium term.