Kantar: Android marketshare in Q1 grew 7.3% YoY in US, 7.1% in top five European markets, and 6% in China; Galaxy S7 said to be selling well in the US
As if Apple wasn't facing enough headwind this year, now comes word that Android smartphones are making big market share gains around the world.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second straight year Kantar has caught a Samsung flagship driving an Android surge: the Galaxy S6 lifted US Android share 2.8 points to 64.9% in mid-2015, and the Q1 2016 numbers show the same playbook repeating with the Galaxy S7 — but this time broadened beyond the US into simultaneous gains of 7.1% in Europe's top five markets and 6% in China.
The significance is geographic breadth. A single-region bump could be read as a carrier promotion or a product cycle quirk; synchronized growth across the three largest smartphone markets points to Samsung's flagship cadence working everywhere at once, with Apple facing headwinds on all fronts at the start of its own upgrade lull.
First-order effects
- Apple enters mid-2016 losing share in all three major regions at once, while Samsung's Galaxy S7 momentum sets up the head-to-head that Kantar later confirmed when the Galaxy S7 outsold the iPhone 6s in the US between March and May.
- Samsung's US strength directly extends the pattern from the S6 cycle, making back-to-back flagships the engine of Android's share gains rather than a one-off.
Second-order effects
- Rival Android OEMs get squeezed from both sides: Samsung's flagship dominance crowds out their premium ambitions just as Android's overall growth makes the platform's non-Samsung tier look increasingly commoditized.
Third-order effects
- The swing proves how volatile platform share remains within a two-vendor duopoly — later in 2016 the direction fully reverses when Kantar attributes a 7-point iPhone jump to 40.5% US share to Samsung's Note7 troubles, showing single-product failures can move platform-level share more than any strategic shift.
The trend: Smartphone platform share is increasingly a function of individual flagship cycles, with Samsung's product hits and misses swinging Android-versus-iPhone balances across all major regions.