There were 112.3 million smartphones shipped in the China market during the third quarter of 2016, increasing 5.2% on quarter and 5.8% on year and accounting for 30.9% of the global total. International vendors shipped 17.1 million units, accounting for 15.2% of the shipments and decreasing 2.8% on quarter and 36.7% on year, according to Digitimes Research.
The growth in shipments was mainly because China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom continued to subsidize purchases of smartphones, mostly inexpensive models, to encourage the shift of 2G and 3G subscribers to 4G, Digitimes Research indicated. As of the end of the third quarter, China Mobile had 480.7 million 4G subscribers, China Telecom 107.5 million and China Unicom 88.9 million.
Among China-based vendors, Oppo had the largest market share at 19.9% of shipments, followed by Vivo with 15.9%, Huawei Technologies 12.1%, Xiaomi Technology 6.3%, GiONEE 5.5%, LeEco 3.8%, Meizu 3.7%, ZTE 2.1%, Coolpad 1.9%, Lenovo 1.6% and Hisense 1.2%. Apple, Samsung Electronics and HTC were the three largest international vendors with market shares of 9.3%, 5.1% and 0.4% respectively.
In the fourth quarter of 2016, 118.4 million smartphones will ship in the China market, including 22.5 million units by non-China-based international vendors.
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