Among the top five smartphone vendors, Huawei was the biggest winner in Q4 on the back of blockbuster flagship models and a steadily rising brand reputation; OPPO and vivo maintained a stable performance by consolidating their strengths in the mainstream price range and online market; Apple continued to decline in the domestic market as its expensive unit prices became increasingly out of line with the tough market environment; and Xiaomi took a significant fall in the domestic market due to various factors including adjustment of product mix and channel inventories and also internal reorganization.

Due to a confluence of factors such as economic pressures, longer replacement cycles, and smaller wallet share, smartphone shipments in the Chinese market were down over 10% in 2018.

IDC pointed that China is in a globally leading position in related 5G technologies, but it should be clearly noted that 5G phones will remain a small share of overall smartphone shipments by the end of 2019 and that it will be a long way to go before large-scale 5G adoption.

With respect to product offerings in 2019, IDC believes that the flagship models will be playing an important role in showcasing the company’s strengths, improving brand value, and strengthening customer loyalty. For their products in the mainstream price range which are meant to boost their sales, they could equip them with some flagship models’ technology features with a view to exploring and testing related technologies before large-scale production and also differentiating them from the competition.

In the saturated domestic smartphone market, winning over existing users will be a more crucial task for smartphone vendors. In this regard, it is advisable to improve precise planning and utilization of limited product and marketing resources based on in-depth user profiling and analysis in terms of extensive factors such as age, gender, city tier, hobbies and interests, and brand perception.