iPhone shipments up 10% in 2020, says Digitimes

A new report says that Apple's iPhone shipments in 2020 rose by more than 10% despite a waning smartphone market.

From Digitimes:

Global smartphone shipments suffered an annual 8.8% decline to 1.24 billion units in 2020, as the rampage of the coronavirus pandemic crippled handset demand and shipments, Digitimes Research has found.

Despite the shrink, however, Digitimes says shipments of 5G handsets actually rose by 20 million to as much as 280-300 million. In the first quarter of 2020 smartphone shipments allegedly fell by 20%, double-digits in the second quarter, and single digits in the third, before rebounding in the fourth.

Digitimes says that Apple is second amongst the top-6 smartphone brands in 2020 behind Samsung and ahead of Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo. The report says Apple and Xiaomi saw their shipments climb by more than 10% on the year before:

The top-6 smartphone brands in 2020 were: Samsung Electronics, Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo. Among them, Apple and Xiaomi managed to ramp up their respective shipments by over 10% from a year earlier, while both Samsung and Huawei saw their shipments dip by a double-digit rate.

The report follows news in December that Apple plans to increase production of the iPhone by up to 30% in 2021 to cope with a surge in demand. From that report:

A new report says that a surge in demand for Apple's iPhone 12 will push the company to make 96 million iPhones in the first half of 2021, a 30% increase year-on-year.

From Nikkei Asian Review:

Apple plans to produce up to 96 million iPhones for the first half of 2021, a nearly 30% year-on-year increase, after demand for its first-ever 5G handsets surged amid the pandemic, Nikkei Asia learned.