Google Shipped 3.9 Million Pixel Devices Last Year; Essential Managed Only 88,000: IDC

Andy Rubin's Android may have become a blast hit with over 80% share of the global smartphone market, but his new smartphone brand 'Essential' is withal suffering from nascency pangs, if the latest installment of IDC'due south Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker is annihilation to get by. The company plainly managed to sell only around 88,000 units of its PH-1 smartphone in the beginning six months after its launch. This was revealed yesterday by a tweet from IDC CEO Francisco Jeronimo‏.

. @Arubin'southward @essential smartphone is still a long way from condign a successful venture. In 2017, it shipped less than 90K units (commencement six months after launch) pic.twitter.com/NHVlA2Gjzr

— Francisco Jeronimo (@fjeronimo) Feb 12, 2018

Other niche, online-only Android vendors, such as Google and OnePlus, accept fabricated giant strides over the by few years, with the IDC study suggesting that the search giant sold effectually 3.ix million Pixel devices during 2017. Information technology isn't immediately evident whether the written report is referring to all 4 Pixel smartphones across generations, or only the two latest devices, simply given how the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL were only launched towards the end of last yr, the numbers very likely accept into business relationship their predecessors every bit well.

#GooglePixel shipments continue to grow, but they still represent a tiny portion of the smartphone market pic.twitter.com/W6FVZlYOlC

— Francisco Jeronimo (@fjeronimo) February 12, 2018

While nobody expected Essential to compete with mainstream brands such as Samsung or Apple, the numbers for the Essential Telephone are yet sub-par, considering how increasingly mainstream other online-just brands are becoming with each passing year. Xiaomi, which started off every bit an online-simply brand, was already selling tens of millions of devices in India and China without any advertising, but venturing into the offline channel in contempo years has fabricated it one of the largest smartphone vendors in the earth, even edging out Samsung to become the largest smartphone vendor in India final year.

It will be interesting to see how Essential scales upwardly its business going forwards, merely selling 100,000 phones a year isn't probable to be a sustainable business concern in the long run.