Apple's iPhone was the best-selling phone worldwide in Q4 2021
Despite chip supply shortages around the world negatively impacting smartphone production, reports show that Apple still managed to come out with the most smartphone sales overall, during the last quarter of 2021.
According to global analyst firm Canalys, this was largely due to the fact that Apple's iPhone 13 saw a particularly strong demand within Mainland China, where Apple's flagships are usually presented with serious competition from Chinese manufacturers on home turf.
"Apple is back at the top of the smartphone market after three quarters, driven by a stellar performance from the iPhone 13," said Canalys's Sanyam Chaurasia in a statement. "Apple saw unprecedented iPhone performance in Mainland China, with aggressive pricing for its flagship devices keeping the value proposition strong."
Counterpoint Research echoed the statement with its own statistics last week, which showed that iPhone 13 was the best-selling smartphone in all of China.
Samsung came in just shy of first place, losing the phone sales crown it had previously held during the whole of 2021. Between January and September, Samsung had reigned as top phone manufacturer, starting the year strong with a whopping 22% share of the market.
Between October and December 2021, Samsung's market share had dropped to 20%, while Apple's iPhone had risen to take over the 22% market share, becoming the number one phone manufacturer in the world. This means that just over one in every five smartphones sold around the world was none other than an iPhone, in Q4 2021.
Canalys VP Mobility, Nicole Peng, said in a statement that the current massive supply chain disruptions (caused by chip shortages as well as the pandemic) have affected low-end vendors the most, and while Apple certainly felt the sting a little, it hasn't been all too drastically hurt by the shortage.
Smartphone brands are already innovating to make the most of their circumstances, tweaking device specs in response to available materials, approaching emerging chipmakers to secure new sources for ICs, focusing product lines on the best-selling models and staggering new product releases. These practices lend an advantage to larger brands, and they are set to stay for the short term, as bottlenecks will not ease until the second half of 2022. —Nicole Peng
Despite Apple's unequivocal success with which it ended the year 2021, as Apple Insidermentions, its numbers were relatively lower than the same quarter in the year prior, when it boasted a 23% market share (compared to Samsung's 17%).
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