In an interesting report out today, Canalys says that while the US smartphone market barely moved in total shipments during Q2 2025, Samsung and India saw huge growth, while Apple saw a rare double-digit dip. Here are the details.
Samsung narrows Apple’s market share lead by nearly half
According to Canalys, while the overall US smartphone market grew just 1% in Q2 2025, reaching 27.1 million units, up from 26.7 million a year earlier, Samsung posted the strongest performance of any vendor. The Korean company shipped 8.3 million units, a 38% increase year over year, with its market share rising from 23% to 31%.
Meanwhile, Apple saw shipments fall 11% to 13.3 million units, down from 14.9 million a year ago. Still, it held the top spot with a 49% share of the US market, ahead of Samsung’s 31%.
In practice, this means that Samsung managed to close the market share gap from 33% a year ago to 18% last quarter, which Runar Bjorhovde, Senior Analyst at Canalys, attributed to:
“Vendors continue to frontload devices and maintain high inventory levels to best cope with the risk of tariffs coming into play later in the year (…). Apple built up its inventories rapidly toward the end of Q1 and sought to maintain this level in Q2. Samsung scaled up its inventory stock in Q2, boosting its shipments to grow 38% year on year, predominantly driven by Galaxy A-series devices. Yet, the market only grew 1% despite vendors frontloading inventory, indicating tepid demand in an increasingly pressured economic environment and a widening gap between sell-in and sell-through. Even if smartphones remain exempted from tariffs, many other categories are impacted, which might greatly impact consumers’ spending patterns and keep smartphone demand modest in H2.”
For reference, during Q2 last year, Canalys registered a 1% annual growth and 19% market share for Samsung (a 2% year over year drop), while Apple came in second with a 6% annual growth and 16% market share, 1% below Q2 2023.
Made in India is the new Made in China
While it may be interesting to see which vendors are doing better or worse in a year-over-year comparison, perhaps the more interesting story this quarter is where these phones may be coming from.
According to Canalys, for the first time, India has overtaken China as the leading manufacturing hub for smartphones shipped into the United States.
This is an obvious result of rising trade and tariff tensions, which resulted in the share of US smartphone shipments manufactured in China dropping sharply from 61% in Q2 2024, to just 25% this quarter. India, meanwhile, surged from 13% to 44% (a whopping 240% year-over-year growth), as vendors raced to diversify their supply chains away from China.
Here’s Sanyam Chaurasia, Principal Analyst at Canalys:
“India became the leading manufacturing hub for smartphones sold in the US for the very first time in Q2 2025, largely driven by Apple’s accelerated supply chain shift to India (…) Apple has scaled up its production capacity in India over the last several years as a part of its ‘China Plus One’ strategy and has opted to dedicate most of its export capacity in India to supply the US market so far in 2025.”
Canalys’ report also notes that Vietnam saw 6% growth as a US-bound smartphone manufacturing hub, now accounting for 30% of total shipments.
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