Apple Inc. is eating into its rivals’ smartphone market share as the iPhone maker navigates through a global chip crunch better than other mobile phone makers, according to data providers.

Higher iPhone shipments helped Apple gain at least 3 percent market share in global smartphones in the third quarter, even as overall shipments shrunk by about 6 percent due to the chip shortage, according to data from market research firms Counterpoint, IDC and Canalys.

Given how closely tech companies guard smartphone sales data, the shipment figures are the best indication of who customers prefer, Reuters reported  from Bengaluru.

“We are expecting another massive quarter for Apple and our expectation is they’ll take a similar 20% shipment share in calendar year Q4,” Counterpoint analyst Tarun Pathak said.

Apple has weathered the supply crunch better than many other companies due to its massive purchasing power and long-term supply agreements with chip vendors even though iPhone 13 production hit a snag due to factory closures in Asia and high demand in the second half of the year.

“Shortages are worst at the low-end, so Apple is less exposed than many of its competitors because it skews heavily toward premium,” Ben Stanton, analyst at Canalys, told Reuters.

Apple increased shipments in the third quarter, while market leader Samsung Electronics and rival Xiaomi Corp saw a drop as customers were lured by the price cuts to the iPhone 12 series and the faster processor and bigger camera in the latest iPhone 13 devices.Supply Chain Woes:However, supply chain woes cost Apple Inc. $6 billion in sales during the company’s fiscal fourth quarter, which missed Wall Street expectations, and Chief Executive Tim Cook said that the impact will be even worse during the current holiday sales quarter.

Cook told Reuters on Thursday the quarter ended September 25 had “larger than expected supply constraints” as well as pandemic-related manufacturing disruptions in Southeast Asia. While Apple had seen “significant improvement” by late October in those Southeast Asian facilities, the chip shortage has persisted and is now affecting “most of our products,” Cook said.

“We’re doing everything we can do to get more (chips) and also everything we can do operationally to make sure we’re moving just as fast as possible,” Cook said.

Cook said the company expects year-over-growth for its quarter ending in December. Analysts expect growth of 7.4 percent to $119.7 billion.

“We’re projecting very solid demand growth year over year. But we are also predicting that we’re going to be short of demand by larger than $6 billion,” Cook said.

Apple’s results were mixed in a fiscal fourth quarter seen as a lull before the high-sales holiday end of year. Apple said revenues and profits for the fiscal fourth quarter were $83.4 billion compared with analyst estimates of $84.8 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.