Europe’s cheap Android phones are losing ground fast, and Counterpoint Research has now put numbers on it. European smartphone shipments fell 10 percent year on year in Q2 2026 to 35 million units — the region’s weakest second quarter since 2023 — and the decline was concentrated almost entirely among the manufacturers who sell at the bottom of the market.
Why budget Android phones took the hit in Europe
Counterpoint’s own explanation names the mechanism directly: component cost hikes pushed final device prices up, and manufacturers scaled back promotions to protect their margins. Those two things together are what a memory shortage looks like by the time it reaches a shop window — not a headline about DRAM contracts, but a phone that costs more than it did and no longer comes with a discount attached.
The regional split follows from that. Western Europe held up better than expected on the back of a strong quarter from Apple and marginal growth from Samsung, both benefiting from buyers trading up. Eastern Europe, which leans far more heavily on lower-cost devices from Chinese manufacturers, fell hard. Counterpoint also points to a difficult macroeconomic climate made worse by the Iran War and the inflation that followed it.
Jan Stryjak, Associate Director at Counterpoint Research, set out what the firm expects next:
With inventory running dry across Europe, we expect further declines over the next few quarters, especially for lower-end players. Apple remains a bright spot though, and we forecast it to continue to significantly outperform the rest of the market for the forseeable future.
(The spelling is Counterpoint’s own.) That forecast is the part worth sitting with. Counterpoint is not predicting a general recovery followed by a general slump — it is predicting that the market keeps splitting, with the premium end insulated and the affordable end continuing to contract.
How the market share shifted, Q2 2025 to Q2 2026
Counterpoint’s shipment-share chart shows where those 3.9 million missing units came from. Note that its OPPO figure includes OnePlus and realme, and that totals may not add to 100 percent because of rounding.
- Apple — 25 percent to 34 percent
- Samsung — 31 percent to 34 percent
- Xiaomi — 19 percent to 15 percent
- OPPO (with OnePlus and realme) — 6 percent to 4 percent
- Honor — 4 percent to 3 percent
- Others — 14 percent to 11 percent
Read those as shares of a market that itself shrank 10 percent, and the picture is starker than the percentages imply. Apple gaining nine points of share in a falling market is a very large move. Xiaomi, OPPO and Honor losing a combined seven points while the pie also shrank means their actual shipment volumes fell considerably further than the share numbers suggest.
What this means if you are buying a phone in Europe
The honest reading for a buyer is that the cheap end of the European market is getting thinner, not better. Fewer promotions is the specific finding to act on — Counterpoint identifies the withdrawal of discounting as a cause of the decline, which means the seasonal price drops many people have learned to wait for are less reliable than they were. If you are holding out for a deal on a mid-range Android phone, the market data does not currently support that strategy.
It is also worth being clear-eyed about what “premiumisation” means as an industry term. It describes buyers spending more, which sounds like a choice. What Counterpoint’s own explanation describes is people buying fewer phones because the affordable ones went up in price and the discounts stopped — and that is a different thing from a market voluntarily trading up. The customers who left the market this quarter are overwhelmingly the ones with the least room in their budget.
Source: Counterpoint Research
