Apple is the top smartphone manufacturer in China for Q1

It was just yesterday when we gave you a quick update on the saturated smartphone market in China. At the same time, we told you that Apple had become the top smartphone seller in the country. Now, we are armed with all kinds of statistics and numbers from IDC, to give you a better and more in depth look at which smartphone manufacturers are on the rise in the country, and which are falling.

Apple rose the larger screen sizes on the Apple iPhone 6 and the Apple iPhone 6 Plus to a leading 14.7% of the Chinese smartphone market for the first quarter of this year. Apple shipped 14.5 million iPhone units in the country, an astounding 62% year-over-year increase. That helped the company edge Xiaomi by one percentage point. The upstart manufacturer garnered a 13.7% slice of the Chinese smartphone pie by shipping 13.5 million phones from January through March.

With 11.2 million units shipped, Huawei was third in China with an 11.4% share of the Q1 2015 smartphone market. Samsung took a fall worthy of Humpty Dumpty, dropping from the number one spot in Q1 2014 to fourth place a year later. In 2014, Sammy shipped 20.5 million smartphones in the first quarter for a 19.9% market share. But a 53% year-over-year decline in shipments left the company with 9.6 million smartphones in transit from January through March. That gave the company a 9.7% piece of the Chinese market to kick off 2015.

Lenovo finished in fifth place with shipments declining by close to 25% over the year, from 10.5 million to 8.2 million smartphones. That dropped the company's market share from 10.2% to 8.3% year-over-year. Overall, 98.8 million smartphones were shipped in the country during the first quarter of 2015. That was off 4.3% from the 103.2 million units shipped in the 2014 first quarter.

With 90% of China already owning a smartphone, some analysts expect the next battle to take place in the high-end sector as current smartphone owners start looking to move up to a higher-spec'd model. The iPhone 6 is among the first top-shelf smartphones to benefit from this migration. Apple now sells more iPhones in China than it does in the U.S.

source: IDC via TheRegister.co.uk