After seeing record shipments in the fourth quarter of 2016, the China smartphone will ease up and try to digest inventory in the first quarter of 2017. Smartphone shipments in the China market are expected to see a year-on-year dip in the quarter, marking the first on-year quarterly decline since the second quarter of 2015, according to data from Digitimes Research.

Shipments in the China market are forecast to total 100 million units in the first quarter, representing a slight 2% drop from the same period one year earlier, Digitimes Research noted.

In its recently published China smartphone market and industry tracker, Digitimes Research noted how telecom carriers are continuing to push the China market to 4G. China Mobile continued to encourage users to switch from 2G/3G to 4G with subsidies on procuring new 4G devices in December 2016 while small-size brands and white-box makers (mostly in the Southern China region) and even some larger brands continued to develop a price-friendly and entry-level 4G device market.

However, inventories starting running high in the local sales channel at the end of 2016, so shipments in the first quarter of 2017 will show an on-quarter drop of almost 20% as inventory is digested.

The top three vendors in the first quarter are expected to be Oppo, BBK, and Huawei, according to the report.