Samsung has more than double Xiaomi’s market share
That’s an absolutely massive slice of the pie for Samsung, and it’s only getting bigger. | Image by Omdia
Apple and Honor can be proud of their latest quarterly jumps
If you think Samsung’s aforementioned 9 percent increase in sales compared to Q1 2025 is impressive, just wait until you hear about the growth of Latin America’s fourth and fifth largest vendors.
Apple, Honor, Samsung, and Xiaomi are all up, while Motorola and the others group are down. | Image by Omdia
Honor is up 30 percent from 2.6 million unit shipments during the first three months of last year to 3.4 million now, while Apple has somehow pulled off a 31 percent regional increase at a time so many other major markets around the world have begun to shrink.
Of course, Apple’s year-on-year sales improvement is likely to sound far less astounding when you consider the company’s rather modest Q1 2025 total of 1.4 million units… that still hasn’t broken the 2 million barrier in Q1 2026. 1.8 million iPhones are only enough for 5 percent market share, which is half of Honor’s slice of the pie and a staggering 32 points behind Samsung.
Samsung holds three of the region’s five biggest crowns
Despite Apple’s incredible rise in Mexico, the nation remains one of Samsung’s key Latin American footholds alongside Brazil and Central America. Samsung’s Brazilian results in particular are destined to crush all hopes of the tech giant’s rivals that they’ll ever be able to catch up in the region, although Xiaomi is the number one vendor in Colombia and Peru.
That’s three key local wins for Samsung, two for Xiaomi, and zero for Apple. | Image by Omdia
Together, these top five markets make up nearly three-quarters of the entire region’s smartphone shipments, and yes, the region as a whole has seen its sales go up from Q1 2025 by 3 percent.
That’s probably not the kind of result you were expecting after hearing about Apple’s 31 percent and Honor’s 30 percent sales jumps, but it’s still growth at a time of such macroeconomic difficulties. Obviously, rising memory costs have impacted Latin American countries as well, but at least for now, the impact is not as substantial as in the US or Western Europe.
Yes, the Latin American smartphone market is growing, at least for the time being. | Image by Omdia
Looking ahead, Omdia researchers expect sales growth to “temper”, but the region might still be able to end 2026 in the green after posting record results in 2025.
