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Gartner has released its quarterly study on global smartphone sales for Q1 2016 and the data isn't especially great for any of the major North American players. Apple tree, Microsoft, and BlackBerry all saw their market share refuse compared with the same period last year, just the news is specially bad for the latter two companies.

Apple and Samsung proceed to hold the summit 2 spots in the overall phone market, with 14.8% and 23.2% of the market respectively, but both companies were off compared with 2015 — Apple tree'south market place share brutal iii.i percentage points, while Samsung's dropped 0.nine percentage points. Huawei and Oppo were the big winners this past year; with Huawei picking up 2.nine per centum points of market share and Oppo moving from 2% of the market in 2015 to 4.6% in 2016.

Lenovo, which had sharply increased its market share in recent years, fell off the map entirely from 2015-2016, suffering a 33% pass up in smartphone shipments. Gartner research director Anshel Gupta writes: "Lenovo had another challenging quarter with its worldwide smartphone sales declining 33 percent. Its smartphone sales fell by 75 per centum in Greater Cathay, where information technology faced potent contest from local brands. Lenovo is also struggling to bring synergies with Motorola'south device business, managing lower costs and overheads of the two brands."

BlackBerry Priv

The BlackBerry Priv was supposed to launch a revitalization of BlackBerry, simply it hasn't played out that way even so.

Only the news is peculiarly bad for two companies in particular: Microsoft and BlackBerry. Both companies have bet on high-profile projects and devices to save their smartphone businesses — Microsoft with Windows 10 Mobile, and BlackBerry with devices like its start Android phone, the BlackBerry Priv. Windows x Mobile is the well-reviewed platform that no one uses or bothers to create apps for, while the Priv is a pretty decent (if not boggling) telephone that BlackBerry was hoping would reboot its unabridged telephone division and hardware sales. If Gartner's figures are remotely accurate, that simply hasn't happened. Now it'south possible that the Priv simply hasn't sold well plenty to get-go the total refuse in BB's handset business, but there'south not a lot of back up for that hypothesis at the moment.

Microsoft telephone sales take fallen to 0.vii% of the market, with an estimated 2.4 million devices sold last quarter, down from two.5% and 8.2 million devices in the first quarter of 2015. BlackBerry shipped just 660,000 mobile phones and held 0.2% of the market, down from 1.325 million and 0.iv% of the market in 2016.

It seems extremely unlikely that either Microsoft or BlackBerry can reverse this plunge and neither visitor seems particularly interested in continuing to try. BlackBerry has already fabricated noise about shifting away from hardware and pivoting to become a software company, while Microsoft has already announced it will sell its feature telephone business to Foxconn for $350 million. While Microsoft has pledged to continue developing Windows 10 Mobile, just the company has reportedly shelved any plans to launch hereafter Lumia devices and it isn't expected to have a so-called Surface Phone in market until 2017. In theory, this could revitalize the Windows Phone market, but with collapsing market share it's hard to see why app developers would target the platform.