Oppo beats Xiaomi to become 4th largest smartphone vendor

According to a new report from Gartner on smartphone sales and market share in Q1, 2016, Oppo has overtaken Xiaomi to become the 4th largest smartphone vendor worldwide.

The Gartner report shows 3 Chinese brands in the top 5 which include Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi in that order. Samsung still occupies the throne with 23.2% by sales volume (about 81 million units sold), although the market share of the company has declined by about 1% since Q1 2015.

Apple is next on the list with 14% market share in Q1 2016 down from 17.9 in Q1 2015. The next three haven't moved as many numbers, in-fact all three combined have sold less smartphones than Samsung during the same period. Still Oppo has pipped Xiaomi to become the number 4 player in the market with a market share of 4.6% compared to just 2% in Q1 2015. While Xiaomi saw a decline of 0.1% to 4.3 selling 15 million units.

But its Huawei that gets the gold star with a market share increase of 2.9% selling more than 28 million smartphones in Q1 2016. With the return of Nokia to the Android space by the end of the year, this table may have a completely different look next year.

Another interesting tidbit in the report shows that Android now has an unscalable lead of 84.1% of the smartphone market compared to distant second, Apple's iOS at 14.8% with Windows Phone and Blackberry combined to have 0.9% share of the pie.