China’s smartphone shipments fell 15.4% from a year earlier to about 57.9 million in the third quarter, but Huawei grew 17.3% and moved into first place with a 21.1% market share, according to IDC.
China’s smartphone shipments reached about 57.9 million units in the third quarter of 2026, a fall of 15.4% from a year earlier, according to IDC figures reported by TelecomLead. The decline is a sharp acceleration from the fall of about 4% in the first half of 2026, according to the same report.
Huawei was the standout. Its shipments grew 17.3% from a year earlier and its market share rose to 21.1%, up 5.9 percentage points from 15.2%, according to IDC. TelecomLead says its success came from a diverse range of products and from restrained pricing that helped it to maintain demand in the face of rising costs.
Apple was second with 17.8% of the market. Its shipments fell 4.3% from a year earlier, a much smaller fall than the market as a whole, according to the report. OPPO was third with 15.5% and shipments down 17.6%, vivo fourth with 15.3% and shipments down 24.9%, and Xiaomi fifth with 13.8% and shipments down 20.4%.
The five shares add up to 83.5%, a sum that is Delima News’ calculation, and the remaining 16.5% went to other brands, which the report does not name.
IDC links the decline to rising memory and other component costs, higher retail prices and changes in product configurations, which have extended replacement cycles and pressured vendors’ profits, according to TelecomLead. That is the same cause as the global decline of 20% reported by Counterpoint, as Delima News reports in a separate article.
The size of Huawei’s lead is easy to work out. Its 21.1% is 3.3 percentage points ahead of Apple’s 17.8%, which is Delima News’ calculation, so the gap is narrow. The sources reviewed do not say who led the market a year earlier, so it is not clear whether Huawei has moved up from a lower ranking.
An implied level of shipments can also be estimated. A fall of 15.4% to 57.9 million means that shipments a year earlier were about 68.4 million, a calculation by Delima News that depends on the rounding of the figures. It implies a loss of about 10.5 million phones in a quarter.
Applying the shares to the total gives rough unit numbers. Huawei’s 21.1% of 57.9 million is about 12.2 million phones, Apple’s 17.8% is about 10.3 million, OPPO’s 15.5% is about 9.0 million, vivo’s 15.3% about 8.9 million and Xiaomi’s 13.8% about 8.0 million. These are Delima News’ own estimates from the published shares and are not IDC figures.
The pattern of changes is clear from the report. Huawei is the only one of the five brands named that grew, and Apple lost the least among the others, with a fall of 4.3% against falls of between 17.6% and 24.9% for OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi. The report does not break down the market by price band or give the units shipped by each brand, so Delima News can only work from the shares and growth rates above.
Delima News will report on IDC’s figures for the fourth quarter when they are published.
Image: A Huawei store (file photo). Photo: 茅野ふたば / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
