This is official, folks! Apple is no longer the best selling smartphone brand in the extensive Chinese smartphone market. Apple has held the title of the company selling the most smartphones in the domestic market of China since 2012. However, as of 2017, the title has gone out of the hand of the Silicon Valley gadget company. Which company outsold one of the biggest names in the smartphone country in China? The title now goes to the domestic Chinese company, Oppo!

Apple was able to sell 12 million sets of the extremely hit phone, iPhone 6S alone in China in 2016. This is almost 2% of the smartphones sold in China in that year. As amazing as the feat is in itself, a local brand was able to trump such a record with a huge margin of almost 5 million sets. Oppo R9 is the flagship phone of the Chinese company Oppo Electronics and it now is the best selling smartphone in China hacing sold almost 17 million units last year.

This means a whopping market share of 4 percent. These statistics have been reported by Counterpoint Research who also stated that 2016 is the first year since 2012 that Apple is not the best-selling smartphone brand in the Asian country. Apple has reported a 21 percent decline in growth in 2016, as compared to the year 2015. Samsung also reported a decrease but it was only 5 percent. The brands which have shown positive growth within China in complete 2016 are Oppo, Vivo, Gionee, Huawei, and Meizu.

Oppo has reported an amazing 109 percent growth and Vivo has grown by 78 percent. Gionee and Huawei posted 21 percent growth each and Meizu further grew by 18 percent. Oppo claims 18.3 percent market share in Q4 of 2016, a remarkable achievement considering it only had 9.4 percent market share in Q4 2015. For the entire year, Huawei has held the biggest market share at 16.4 percent. Let us hope that Apple learns from its competitors have gets back its foothold in the Chinese market. For more news about smartphones, keep browsing MobileNApps!