Kantar has published its market share data for the last quarter of 2018, which once again demonstrates that Android is the overwhelming winner in the mobile phone market, both in Europe and Spain. Can you guess which brands contributed to these results? We'll tell you.
Android and iOS market share in Europe and Spain
Kantar Worldpanel Comtech makes it perfectly clear: three out of every four smartphones sold in the main European markets (UK, Spain, France, Italy, and Germany) are now Android. This is the conclusion reached after studying the latest smartphone operating system data collected by the firm for the last quarter of 2018.
The agency has published the figures for the aforementioned period on its official website and compared them with those of the same quarter last year so we can better observe the year-on-year change. We can thus see how the difference between Android and iOS has become more pronounced this year , with the former rising to 75,8% in Western Europe and iOS falling to a 23,5% market share—Windows and others are now practically negligible.
The main culprits behind this increase for Android? Huawei , Honor , and Xiaomi , whose growth, according to the consulting firm's data, translates into almost 34 million users of their smartphones. In the case of Xiaomi , the brand has already positioned itself as the fourth best-selling smartphone brand in Europe, with almost six million customers. Kantar even goes so far as to point to the key to the success of these Chinese companies : their near abandonment of traditional media campaigns (TV, press) in favor of social networks and their much cheaper and, as is evident, effective reach.
In Spain , the differences between operating systems are only becoming more pronounced. As you can see in the graph below, in the fourth quarter of 2018, 89,9% of devices in the country were Android, compared to 9,9% iPhones. Last year, around the same time, the use of Google's OS was at 87,1%, while Apple held 12,7%.
In China itself , Huawei is currently unstoppable. The company has set a record in its latest quarter, with a market share of 26,9% (an incredible increase compared to last year's 16,5%), causing the rest of the market to stagnate or decline. The Honor 8X was the best-selling phone, and six of the ten best-selling products in the country are from Huawei or its sister brand Honor. Although things haven't gone as well for Apple in other markets , the iPhone XS Max has had an unusual impact in China, becoming the fourth best-selling model of the quarter in a country enamored with large phones.