Global smartphone shipments suffered an annual 8.8% decline to 1.24 billion units in 2020, as the rampage of the coronavirus pandemic crippled handset demand and shipments, Digitimes Research has found.
But countering the adverse market trend, worldwide shipments of 5G-enabled phones reached as high as 280-300 million units in 2020, up from the 20 million units shipped a year earlier.
Global smartphone shipments dove over 20% on year in the first quarter of 2020, fell by a double-digit rate in the second, and narrowed the decline to a single digit in the third, before staging a single-digit rebound in the fourth, Digitimes Research's figures show.
The top-6 smartphone brands in 2020 were: Samsung Electronics, Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo. Among them, Apple and Xiaomi managed to ramp up their respective shipments by over 10% from a year earlier, while both Samsung and Huawei saw their shipments dip by a double-digit rate.