While the global smartphone market had a lot to suffer in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, younger and less saturated segments of the tech industry impressively managed to sustain their growth levels over the last couple of years.

Smart speaker sales, for instance, only registered one quarterly year-over-year decline in the market's history... until the first three months of 2022. That's right, the opening quarter of this year was not great for the Amazon-dominated industry, which somewhat surprisingly contracted by 4.5 percent compared to Q1 2021.

What happened and who won?

That seemingly shocking contraction comes as less of a surprise when you realize that Alibaba, Baidu, and Xiaomi are three of the top six global vendors. These companies are almost entirely reliant on domestic manufacturing and domestic sales, both of which proved problematic between January and March 2022 due to "unprecedented resurgences of COVID-19 that shut down daily life for many Chinese" people. The three's double-digit declines greatly contributed to Apple's rise to the vendor podium, although Amazon and Google continue to look untouchable in their gold and silver medal positions respectively. Naturally, it would be extremely unfair to attribute the HomePod mini's surge to renewed Chinese lockdowns and other market "disruptions" caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine only, especially given another remarkable achievement pulled off by the diminutive Siri-enabled speaker.

For the first time ever, Apple has the single best-selling smart speaker model around the world, beating Amazon's fourth-generation Echo Dot and Google's Nest Mini, both of which happen to be considerably more affordable than the HomePod mini.

In total, 4.5 million HomePod mini copies were moved during Q1 2022, enough for a 12.7 percent slice of a 35.3 million unit pie, which is a pretty incredible accomplishment for the maker of just one smart speaker (after the retirement of the "standard" HomePod).