By Li Panpan

(JW Insights) Aug 7 -- China's smartphone shipments fell by 5% year-on-year and rose by 2.9% quarter on quarter in the second quarter. It's the worst second quarter in the past decade, but the decline is narrower than in previous quarters, marking the beginning of the recovery in China's smartphone industry, according to the latest data of Techinsights.

Smartphone shipments in China fell 13% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2023 and 15% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2022.

In terms of manufacturers in the second quarter, OPPO (including OnePlus) continued to lead the Chinese smartphone market with a 19% market share, followed by vivo (18%), Honor (17%), and Apple (16%). Xiaomi ranked fifth and significantly declined among the top five smartphone makers.

These five vendors accounted for 83 percent of the Chinese market, down from 87 percent a year ago. Part of the market share was lost to Huawei and Meizu, which grew 25% and 205% year-on-year in the quarter. The Nova 11 series is the primary growth driver for Huawei, and Meizu gained attention this quarter with its new Meizu 20 series.

From the perspective of global smartphone shipments in Q2 in 2023, TechInsights data shows that total shipments fell by 8% year-on-year to 269 million units. The global top ten manufacturers were Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, OPPO (OnePlus), Transsion (the sum of Tecno, itel, and Infinix brands), Vivo, Honor, realme, Lenovo-Motorola, and Huawei. Eight of them are Chinese.