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Only Samsung sold more smartphones than Xiaomi last quarter, with Apple dropping to 3rd place
Jumping in the gap left by Huawei
With former rising star Huawei out of the way due to US sanctions, another Chinese manufacturer is emerging to take over the smartphone market — Xiaomi. The company could grow its shipments by a whopping 83% in the second quarter of 2021, making it the vendor with the second highest market share at 17%. It's only narrowly surpassed by Samsung with a share of 19%.
Turns out Apple is not the only company expecting to disappoint investors with its next set of quarterly results — Samsung and LG are in the same boat. Whether or not it's for precisely the same reasons is unclear, but it seems a plateauing smartphone market is at least partially to blame for all three companies' guidance misses.
LG is a profitable company overall, reporting growing profits almost every quarter. However, LG's mobile division has been an anchor around the company's neck. LG mobile still isn't profitable in the just-released Q3 results, but the losses have lessened. LG thinks it can turn the corner and start making money on smartphones again, but it's not exactly within striking distance of that goal.
LG revealed its second-quarter results today, and the news is good overall. The company had sales of $13.9 billion (up 3.2%) and a profit of $715.1 million (up 16.1%). The profit is thanks to brisk sales of appliances and home theater equipment. However, LG's mobile division continues to lose money.
Samsung posted its earnings for Q3 2016, and it is not as pleasant as it was three months ago. For the period ending September 30, 2016, total revenue was 47.82 trillion KRW ($42.01 billion USD), a decrease of 3.87 trillion KRW ($4.57 billion USD) from this point last year. Without going too much further into the financial details (I get excited about financial results, okay?), we can all guess the reason for the decline. The IT & Mobile Communication Division is what dragged Samsung down, but its other divisions showed some good results. The Consumer Electronics Division's favorable sales in SUHD TVs and home appliances are especially of note in the report.