Nine of the world's top 12 smartphone suppliers were headquartered in China, including Huawei, OPPO, Vivo and Xiaomi, as a 2017 ranking of the top smartphone leaders in terms of unit shipments showed.

According to the rankings released by Arizona-based global semiconductor market research firm IC Insights, the other three suppliers are two South Korean companies, Samsung and LG, and one from the US, Apple.

Huawei, OPPO, Vivo and Xiaomi are only four of the top 12 companies that registered double-digit unit growth. Among these companies, Xiaomi's 73 percent rate is the highest. Meanwhile, another three Chinese suppliers -- LeEco/Coolpad, ZTE and TCL -- saw their smartphone shipments fall by more than 20 percent last year.

As the data showed in the ranking list, the nine leading smartphone suppliers based in China shipped 626 million smartphones in 2017, an 11 percent increase from the 565 million smartphones that these nine companies shipped in 2016. And the total share of the top nine Chinese smartphone suppliers reached 42 percent in the global smartphone market in 2017, up from the 38 percent share in 2016 and 34 percent in 2015.

However, the ranking report said Samsung and Apple still hold a commanding share of the high-end smartphone segment -- smartphones priced more than $200.

IC Insights predicted that smartphone shipments this year will rise 2 percent to 1.53 billion units, and smartphone unit shipments are expected to grow at low single-digit annual rates through 2021.