The first quarter of 2024 saw the European smartphone market register its first year-over-year increase in shipments since 2021, and Chinese brands are growing the most.
Smartphone shipments in the first quarter of the year were ten percent higher than in the first quarter of last year according to"The European market is showing signs of a recovery and consumer confidence is improving, helped by some interesting innovations around on-device AI," said associate director Jan Stryjak at Counterpoint Research.
"But we are not out of the woods yet," he cautioned."Although we expect the market to grow by low single digits for the rest of 2024, this is still off the back of an extremely poor 2023, and we do not expect to return to pre-pandemic levels anytime soon." Counterpoint doesn't delve into why its outlook is so gloomy, but we can probably guess it's due to economic headwinds that have persisted globally since 2022. Inflation is still elevated in Europe and interest rates are still at a high .
The report outlines that the biggest winners in Europe were Chinese phone brands, mainly Xiaomi, Realme, and Honor, which saw year-over-year shipment boosts of 11 percent, 59 percent, and 67 percent respectively. That's in contrast to Samsung, whose shipments grew seven percent, and especially Apple, which actually saw a decline of one percent.