SerpApi.Org
If you were to guess, who would you say is the world's number one foldable smartphone vendor right now? If your answer is Samsung, you're actually wrong... by a mile. But you will probably soon be correct. Not for long, though. Allow me to explain.
Samsung is just not big enough in China
If you caught a quarterly or annual Chinese smartphone market report at any point over the last few years, you may have been surprised to see Samsung omitted from the nation's top five and even top ten vendors. After all, this is the world's second largest handset maker we're talking about here.
But while the company is evidently able to maintain that position in the mobile industry thanks primarily to its strong presence in other key regions like India and Europe, that's simply not possible in the foldable segment, which relies heavily on Chinese sales.
As a consequence, Huawei is the clear leader of the global foldable market, holding a massive 48 percent slice of the pie in Q2 2026. That's up from an already impressive 45 percent share during the same timeframe of last year, and it easily beats the 15 percent slice of the world's foldable sales held by Samsung between April and June of this year.
The gap is of course a lot smaller between silver medalist Samsung and bronze medalist Motorola, which accounts for a solid 13 percent of worldwide foldable shipments of its own, while Honor is a very close fourth place finisher with essentially the same 12 percent market share as the entire group of "other" vendors.
Both Huawei and Samsung are up
... and yet neither Huawei, nor Samsung is the market segment's biggest gainer of Q2 2026. That's actually Honor, whose foldable shipments incredibly jumped 82 percent from Q2 2025, dwarfing the otherwise solid 4 and 25 percent year-on-year progress of Huawei and Samsung, respectively.
Samsung's 25 percent growth, of course, means that the Galaxy Z Flip 7 and especially the Z Fold 7 managed to prove more successful than their predecessors, while Huawei's stellar sales figures were owed in large part to the brand-new Pura X Max, which instantly connected with mainstream global audiences, but also to the older Mate X7 and Pura X, which maintained "healthy demand" in several key markets (starting with China).
Honor, meanwhile, absolutely exploded thanks to the Magic V6, which blew everyone's minds with its gorgeous design, setting a new style standard that the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra will probably struggle to match.
Speaking of struggles, Motorola must be disappointed but not completely shocked by falling from second to third place in the global vendor ranking and shedding no less than 28 percent of its foldable volumes between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026 as a direct consequence of an... uninspired Razr 70 series pricing structure. Clearly, the brand's latest Razrs are too expensive for their own good in both Europe and the US, and Motorola will need to drastically reduce those new prices to go after Samsung again.
How is the market on the whole doing and what's next?
Normally, a 2 percent year-on-year sales decline for a still-young and relatively small product category would be considered a disastrous result, but as the broader smartphone market shrunk by no less than 8 percent, that can actually be viewed as a surprisingly positive achievement.
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The 3.4 million unit total of Q2 2026 is obviously expected to go up between July and September thanks primarily to the highly anticipated launch of the Galaxy Z Fold 8, Z Fold 8 Ultra, and Z Flip 8, and yes, Samsung is predicted to overtake Huawei and become the world's number one foldable handset vendor this quarter.
But the company's supremacy is unlikely to last long, and you can probably easily guess why. That's right, the iPhone Ultra is "to blame", although it remains unclear if the world's most highly anticipated foldable... ever will be released early and widely enough to propel Apple to the top vendor spot in Q4 2026.
What all analytics firms can agree on is that Apple will likely be the number one foldable vendor around the world in 2027, helping the market grow by a predicted 38 percent year-on-year while overall smartphone sales are expected to continue going down. Now that's a crazy stat... if it proves accurate!
