And let's look from speculation back to statistics. Gartner took a look at how it's doing in its latest report Applu and other smartphone manufacturers in the world market and shows that Apple he has quite a reason to be happy. He managed to increase iPhone sales by up to 36% year-on-year, which is due to larger display sizes. On the contrary, the competition did not do very well compared to last year and the biggest competitor, Samsung, recorded a year-on-year sales decline of 5,3%. In this area, people complain the most that Samsung has removed the memory card slot and removable battery from its phones and decided to go the unibody design route that is popular with Applu and HTC.
Despite this, Samsung remains the dominant smartphone manufacturer in the world. Its share is 21,9% of the world market, while a year ago it was 26,2%. Share Applu grew from 12,2% to 14,6%. Surprisingly, the third largest manufacturer is Huawei, whose share in this quarter is 7,8%. The fact that Xiaomi finished in fifth place in the table with a 4,9% share is also interesting. Applu is doing very well in the high-end phone segment, where the company has seen double-digit growth compared to last year, while at the same time significantly crippling the sales and margins of competing manufacturers. Because of this, manufacturers like Samsung had to tidy up their portfolio and began to focus more on the fight in the field of mid-range and low-end phones. An example is Samsung, which instead of the usual names (Samsung Galaxy Large Max Neo Plus Duos) announced series that have common features and properties (Galaxy A, Galaxy E, Galaxy J). Applu sales in China grew by 68%, which is a great achievement considering that the market there fell by 4%. The reason, according to the analyst, is that iPhone and brand Apple represents social status.
*Source: 9to5mac
Samsung is only going to go down, especially after the blunder they made with the new note 5. A lot of people were waiting for it and they will only sell it in the US, India and Korea.
Samsung will go down because its room to maneuver has narrowed. Apple it took away the only competitive advantage it had - a larger display, and more and more cheap Chinese are pushing it from the other side of the market.
Moreover, many users are starting to discover that their famous touchwiz is just a performance eater, and pure Android runs much better on comparable hardware.
Hard times are ahead for Samsung.