I always knew Xiaomi would at some point race to the top because of its aggressive approach to product manufacturing every year. Xiaomi releases smartphones as if it wants to oust its entire competition. But that’s a story for another time. The main story here is that Xiaomi has been successful with its approach in overtaking the big Apple from the top three position and down to the fourth place during the third quarter of 2020.

One reason for this is due to the 1 month delay of the iPhone 12 series which was supposed to be released back in September but got shifted towards October due to the bad impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on manufacturing.

If you remember well, earlier this year, people seems to be conservative about spending especially on smartphones due to the uncertain situations of the worldwide lockdown as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic. With the world slowly but surely creeping back to normalcy, Xiaomi seems to be taking advantage of this as the Chinese tech giant was able to sell majority of the devices it released during the third quarter of 2020 according to a research firm Gartner.

The top four smartphone makers worldwide by market share in Q3 2020

For the records, Xiaomi has been able to sell a huge 44 million smartphones in the third quarter of 2020 alone which is an increase from 12 million over the same period back in 2019. With that number, it puts the Chinese brand right behind its fellow Chinese tech manufacturer Huawei which shipped under 52 million units of smartphones while Samsung took the first place again with about 80 million shipment.

Apple on the other hand took the fourth place with 40 million shipment but one reality is the year-on-year performance declined only by a bit. One factor that probably also played out to Apple staying afloat in 2020 would be the release of the iPhone SE (2020) earlier this year at a period when nobody was willing to spend exorbitant money on smartphones.

Huawei on the order hand had a significant drop in its ranking with its previous shipment being around 66 million units then dropping down to just 52 million this year. This can be well traced to the US ban on the company’s operation restricting it from major markets because it couldn’t partner with Google and that alone is enough to ruin any smartphone company in 2020 because of the large influence the search giant has on most internet users worldwide.

But all hope isn’t lost just yet with Apple as the iPhone 12 sales has been good thus far. This might still put Xiaomi being at this position under probation. The end of Q4 will further determine if Xiaomi has been able to maintain the position well enough.