Smartphones overtake feature phones in China

For the first time, smartphones are outselling feature phones in China.

According to government research institute CATR, smartphone sales overtook sales of feature phones in April and accounted for 56.9% of all sales in June.

CATR’s stats for the first half, posted on C114. show Chinese also bought more 3G phones than 2G in the period – another first.

Altogether, 194.9m handsets were sold in China in the period - 106.87m 3G and 88.04m 2G. 

Smartphones accounted for 48.7% of the volume over the six months, or 94.86m units. 

But, underlining 2G's dominance in China, GSM remains the biggest single seller. GSM phones took 42.0% of the market, with W-CDMA in second place (27.3%), followed a long way back by cdma-2000 (14.5%), TD-SCDMA (13.1%) and cdma-1x (3.1%).

Worldwide phones sales were 398.4m in Q1, of which 145m were smartphones, according to IDC.