October smartphone shipments rose 30.6% YoY across China, reports finds

In a positive development during an economic crisis, smartphones shipments within China rose 30.6 percent year-on-year to 32.7 million handsets in October, the China Academy of Information and Communications (CAICT) reported earlier last week.

As such, 26 new models were released last month, up 4 percent from a year earlier, especially after a large fall that began in the first half of the year, with the revival driven by the release of the latest models of Apple Inc’s iPhone, according to a research firm.

Apple launched the iPhone 13 in China in September, whilst handset brands are currently experiencing production issues due to a global computer chip shortage. This is an important increase from a year ago, in October 2020, when shipments reached 25 million, the report said.

During the first ten months of the year, China’s mobile phone shipments stood at 282 million units, up 12 percent year on year.

According to Statista, the number of smartphone users in China reached around 970 million in 2020, whereas the number of smartphone users worldwide exceeded six billion that year.

Shipment numbers were up from about 25 million in October 2020 and 20.8 million in September 2021, according to the CAICT, a state-backed think-tank.

It is worth mentioning that the country’s domestic brands continued to dominate mobile phone shipments last month, according to Xinhua news agency. “Their shipments topped 22.81 million units, making up 67.9 percent of the total shipments,” it noted.

For the moment, shipments of 5G smartphones in the communist country reached 167.5 million units in 2020, constituting more than half of the total smartphone shipment throughout the year, according to global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

China shipped 60.1 million 5G handsets in the fourth quarter last year, data from IDC showed.

The shortage is due to a number of factors including unexpected factory shutdowns, U.S.-China tensions, and demand miscalculation, that have triggered a number of automobile companies to report chip sourcing issues.