Samsung and Huawei were the manufacturers who immediately believed in foldable smartphones. The Korean company, in particular, was certainly also able to benefit from its production capacity which has seen it as a leader in the flexible OLED panel sector for years. Huawei, for its part, has encountered many difficulties in recent years due to the US ban which has now reduced its capacity to a minimum.
Being pioneers in a sector, if on the one hand it also provides for the possibility of error, which happened at the beginning to both companies who had to perfect their first devices after having already launched them on the market, on the other it certainly also brings many benefits . After a few years, in fact, Samsung is the absolute leader in this market segment which has achieved, according to the research company Canalys, 14.2 million units shipped last year.
Of these, a little less than 12 million are from Samsung, pretty much almost everything, and about 2 million are from Huawei. The rest, an almost irrelevant quantity, is divided between OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi and Honor, all with much less than 1 million, and Motorola which has sold around 40,000 Razr.
At the moment, talking about competition is decidedly premature even if all these Chinese companies are gradually bringing increasingly interesting foldables to the market, not least OPPO with the Find N2 Flip and Honor with the Magic Vs, also taking advantage of the continuous technological progress in the sector , often offering even better solutions than those adopted by the Korean company. In the meantime, however, the leaflet market has already experienced a first year-on-year decline.
However, 2022 closed in a positive way for leaflets, with a +62% compared to the previous year, and analysts’ forecasts see 2023 still growing but in a decidedly more competitive context. In fact, for Samsung both a first and a second quarter are expected to decline and a market share which, towards the middle of 2023, will it could even drop to 50%.
