In the fourth calendar quarter of 2017, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) regained some of the market share it lost during the third quarter. The company’s decision to delay shipments of the iPhone X until November had only a temporary effect on its share of key markets.
The data were reported Tuesday by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech based on research by the firm’s global consumer panel. The analysis is based on operating system data gathered online and is reported as a rolling three-month average.
In Germany, Apple’s market share rose from 21.4% in at the end of the 2016 fourth quarter to 23.8% at the end of December 2017. More interesting, perhaps, is the big jump in Apple market share over the three months of the past quarter:
- September: iOS share: 15.6%
- October: 15.6%
- November: 20.9%
- December: 23.8%
Apple’s share rose more than 8% once the iPhone X began shipping in Germany. Over the same period, Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Android operating system saw its share drop from 82.8% in September to 74.8% in December, a dip of 8%.
Kantar executive Dominic Sunnebo commented:
The full results for the last quarter of the year show that Apple’s decision to release three new handsets over a staggered period, including the ultra high-end iPhone X, has been a sound one. With Apple’s existing release structure, expectations would always be that the flagship model would be the top selling device in key developed markets, but with the premium price of iPhone X, real life affordability has come into play. Given that in December iPhone X made it into the top three best-selling devices across all key regions, particularly in urban China where it was the top selling model, the pricing strategy seems to have been vindicated.
In China, Apple’s share rose from 17.7% at the end of September to 28.6% at the end of December. Android’s share fell from 82.2% in September to 71.2% in December.
Apple’s U.S. market share rose from 34.9% in September to 43.9% in December compared to a drop of 8.6 percentage points in Android’s share to 55.3% of the U.S. market.
Kantar also noted that Samsung and Apple dominate the U.S. handset market with a combined share of nearly 71% in the last quarter of 2017. Google’s share rose a full percentage point year over year to 2.8%, while Motorola’s share rose 0.5 point to 5.6% and Huawei’s share was unchanged at 0.4% of the U.S. market.
The following data visualization is also available at Kantar’s website, along with additional commentary.
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