Analysts: the iPhone 13 was the best selling phone in China in January, Honor shows massive gains
The Apple iPhone 13 was the best-selling individual model in China in the month of January with 2.3 million sales, shows data by CINNO Research. This is the fourth month straight that the vanilla 13 has been on top of the individual sales charts (including October to December of last year). An iPhone hadnât topped this chart in six years before that.
The iPhone 13 made up a significant chunk of all Apple sales in January in China, the company moved 5.1 million units in total. That is an 11.4% increase compared to January of last year.
The Chinese market is effectively level with last year (+0.4%), but grew 38.6% compared to December (the Spring festival, the most important in China, kicks off on February 1). A total of 30.87 million smartphones were sold in the country.
The market is led by Oppo with 5.4 million units sold, a drop of over 20% compared to January last year. Note that the numbers do not include Realme phones. The best selling phones were the Oppo Reno 7 5G (the Chinese version, of course) and the Oppo A56 5G.
vivo (excluding iQOO phones) is in second place, barely ahead of Honor. vivo also declined (-13.2%), while Honor shot up and more than tripled its sales for January compared to last year. Huawei is not in the Top 5 anymore, but the independent brand is recapturing lost ground.
The best-selling vivo phone was the vivo S12. As for Honor, multiple models made it into the Top 10: Honor 60, Honor X30, Honor Play 30 Plus and Honor Play 20. The Magic4 series (unveiled at the MWC) is expected to further boost Honor's growth, but we won't see that for a couple of months.
Meanwhile, Xiaomi slipped to 5th place with a 12.7% decline compared to last year. The 4.4 million sales number means that the company was overtaken by both Honor and Apple. The Xiaomi 12 series (launched in December) didn't have much of an impact.