Apple’s total global smartphone shipments dropped -3% annually in Q3 2019. Despite the slight decline, this was Apple’s best growth performance since last year, and there are signs of stabilization.

The company performed slightly worse than the overall smartphone market, which in average grew 2% YoY in Q3 2019. Apple is still the 3rd largest vendor globally, behind Samsung and Huawei, and the company couldn’t close the gap to second-placed Huawei, despite the ban of the Chinese vendor by the US government.

In September, Apple launched the iPhone 11 lineup. This has been the first time ever that Apple willingly dropped the price of its new devices, compared to the ones from the year before. That helped the company stabilize its decline in shipments and slightly speed-up the replacement cycles.

Despite all that, Apple continues to struggle to get any traction in emerging markets, due to limited carrier subsidies, iPhone’s prices for these less-affluent regions are still too steep.

WSS clients can find the answers of all questions, and much more, in the full report here.