China apparently has over 1 Billion mobile phone users. Regarding that figure, analysts at Gartner are predicting that about 443.5 Million mobile devices will be sold in China in 2014 alone. Furthermore, they indicate that 90% of those devices will be smartphones. Gartner is also predicting that higher-end devices will pick steam in China this year, and will comprise of 20% of all mobile phone sales.
Gartner expects that by 2017 sales of high-end devices should increase to 32%. In the Gartner study, several different manufacturers were listed to likely have good success this year. These include Samsung, Lenovo, Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo. One newcomer to the market was mentioned to be making waves. A company called TCL is selling their mobile devices under the Alcatel brand globally. Supposedly they only shipped 16 million total mobile devices last year, but the striking thing about that number is that their growth doubled throughout 2013.
These numbers illustrate why China is probably the most important market for mobile in the next few years. It also shows one of the biggest reasons why Android is dominating mobile smartphones globally.
Source: UnWiredView