Apple Leads Rapidly Contracting Australian Smartphone Market

That latest numbers on the Australian smartphone market are a basic good news, bad news situation for Apple. The good news is they still lead the Australian smart phone market. The bad news is the market is slowing down notably as it rapidly approaches saturation.

According to IDC’s figures, Q2 smartphone sales dipped 18 percent from the same quarter last year to only 1.8 million units shipped. This marks the third consecutive quarter Apple has seen double digit year-on-year declines.

“The market has reached its saturation point for a while now and shipments are driven more and more by refresh cycles rather than first-time purchases,” IDC Australia market analyst Bilal Javed said.

Apple is still the biggest fish on the pond down under – 40.4 percent of all smartphones sold in Australia are made by Apple. But that is a step back from Q1, when that figure was at 48.4 percent. In fact, Q2 marks the slowest growth Apple has seen by the quarter in two years — and smaller less expensive handset makers have stepped into the gap and snapped up some market share of their own. Samsung, and the strength of the s Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, have also eaten into Apple’s market share.

The figures are likely soon to change. IDC notes that Apple, Samsung and Google are all expected to drop major new smartphone products on the market during Q3, which will likely put the market back into positive yearly growth territory.

But the market is getting undeniably smaller — worldwide smartphone shipments were up just 0.3 percent year-on-year to 343.3 million.

At present, Samsung’s Galaxy models are outselling  Apple iPhone 6’s — Samsung shipped 77 million phones in the second quarter of 2016 to Apple’s shipped 40.4 million — a 15-percent drop for the Californian giant from the same period last year.