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For the first time ever, smartphone sales go down year-over-year
July 02, 2025
Smartphone sales fell overall inthe last quarter of 2017for the first time ever. Research and advisory companyGartnerstarted tracking the global smartphone market in 2004 (right around the release of thePalm Treo 650, for those old enough to remember that). Since then, each passing year saw smartphone sales increase or level off, until now.
In Q4 2016, smartphone sales topped out at about 432 million units sold. In Q4 2017 there were only approximately 408 million units sold. That’s a drop of about 5.6 percent.
Gartner has two theories for the drop: upgrades from feature phones to smartphones have slowed, and people arekeeping their current smartphoneslonger than they used to. These theories are sound, but after 14 years of availability, pretty much everyone who wants a smartphone probably has one. The only people going without are eitherin developing nationsor simplydon’t want one.
The sales drop is no doubt remarkable, due to it being the first time, but hardly surprising. Smartphoneshave reached a saturation pointand each new one releasedlooks and works a lot like the previous year’s phones. It was only a matter of time before the momentum slowed.
Still, the Q4 report isn’t all bad news. According to Gartner,Samsungincreased its market share from 17.8 percent to 18.2 percent, putting it in a clear lead ahead of rivalApple. Last year, both companies were neck-and-neck, with Samsung only ahead of Apple by about 700,000 units. However, both companies dropped in units sold overall.
Xiaominearly doubled its market share from 3.6 percent in Q4 2016 to 6.9 percent in Q4 2017.HuaweiandOppoboth saw slight increases as well. Xiaomi actually moved almost 79 percent more product YOY in Q4 2017, which is incredible.
Notably, Gartner did not supply results from manufacturers likeLG,Lenovo,HTC,Sony,OnePlus,Essential, or evenGoogle. All those companies just got lumped into the “Other” category.
You can see the chart of Gartner’s results below:
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