Global smartphone sales are set to remain weak for the rest of the year, with total sales to reach 1.5-billion smartphones, says research and advisory firm Gartner.

Its forecast follows on the back of a 1.7% decline year-on-year in second-quarter sales to 368-million units.

The demand for high-end smartphones has slowed at a greater rate than demand for midrange and low-end smartphones, says Gartner senior research director Anshul Gupta.

Gupta notes, however, that manufacturers are introducing premium features – such as multi-lens front and back cameras, bezel-less displays and large batteries – usually found in flagship smartphones to lower-priced models as a means to encourage consumers to replace their older-model phones with newer ones.

Of the top five global smartphone vendors, Huawei and Samsung exhibited the strongest yearly sales increases in the second quarter at 16.5% and 3.8%, respectively.

“As a result, they both grew market share in the quarter, which led them to account for more than a third of total smartphone sales globally,” Gupta says.

Further, the Huawei ban announcement led to a sharp decline in Huawei’s smartphone sales in the global market in the second quarter, although sales have improved slightly since the ban’s deferment.

The Huawei ban follows after the US banned the telecommunications giant from bidding on US government contracts in 2014, with US President Donald Trump in the months following, signing a Bill barring Huawei and ZTE from use by the US government and contractors.

Canada and the UK also expressed concerns about the risks associated with working with Huawei on 5G deployment, while Japan also banned Huawei and ZTE from official government contracts.

The US has since added more of Huawei’s subsidiaries to its trade blacklist, even as it is delaying a ban on US companies doing business with Huawei.

The decisions by the US government are, in part, the result of an escalating trade war between the US and China.

While its smartphone sales were weaker globally, strong promotion and brand positioning helped Huawei sell a record number of smartphones in Greater China in the quarter, growing 31% in the region. 

Samsung, however, sold over 75-million smartphones in the second quarter and grew its share by 1.1 percentage points year-on-year.

The strong demand for Samsung’s new Galaxy A series smartphones and the revamp of its entire entry-level and midrange smartphone range helped this positive performance, Gupta explains, adding that the demand for Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S10 started to weaken during the quarter, however, indicating that achieving growth in 2019 as a whole “will be a challenge”.

Sales of iPhones continued to decline year-on-year in the second quarter, although at a slower rate than in the first quarter of the year.

Apple sold just over 38-million iPhones in the second quarter, a 13.8% decline year-on-year.

This, Gupta notes, is owing to too few incremental benefits, which are preventing existing iPhone users from replacing their smartphones. Apple has reached an inflection point marked by shifting its business toward services, which represented 21% of the vendor’s total revenue in the first quarter of the year.

Globally, among the top five countries in smartphone sales, China held the number one position with 101-million smartphone sales in the second quarter, up 0.5% year-on-year.

Achieving 10.8-million smartphone sales in the same period, Brazil was the only other country in the top five to exhibit growth – of 1.3% year-on-year – as the economy in Brazil is starting to slowly recover. This smartphone growth is a small indicator of stronger economic growth expected in 2020, Gupta says.

India sold 35.7-million smartphones, achieving a market share of 9.7% in the second quarter.

These sales in India, however, represented a 2.3% decline year-on-year, however, mainly owing to slowing consumer upgrades from feature phones to smartphones.