Huawei and Apple are currently the leading brands in China’s smartphone sales segment for Q2 2026. While the entire market experienced a decline of 4.3% year on year, the iPhone and Mate phone makers are seeing major annual growth.
IDC has now published a new report that reveals the sales conditions of the Chinese smartphone market in the second quarter of this year. The rising memory and component costs have led many Android OEMs to increase the price of their products.
As a result, the “phone upgrade demand” among consumers rapidly cooled down not only for the newly released handsets but also for the existing ones.
On the other hand, Huawei and Apple maintained a steady pricing strategy that helped them to remain at the peak of China’s smartphone sales market in Q2 2026.
Huawei leads with 22.6% of the market share in the second quarter of this year, up from 18.1% in 2Q25. The company is seeing a YoY growth of 19.4%. Apple followed with 18.1% market share (13.9% last year), achieving 24.4% yearly progress.
(Image Credits: IDC)
Brands like OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, Honor, Lenovo, and more are witnessing negative growth. Only Huawei and Apple appeared on the list with a positive sales hike. Research Analyst at IDC, Arthur Guo, said:
“Huawei and Apple held their prices steady while competitors were raising theirs, and that gave hesitant buyers a reason to go ahead and purchase in a quarter when most of the market was giving them a reason to wait.”
The report said that Huawei is expanding its lineup to cover more of the market. Whereas Apple is pulling customer attention by not increasing the price of existing models like the iPhone 17 series.
Whether the two brands will continue to experience the same growth in the third quarter of this year or face a decline is worth looking forward to!
