Huawei Takes #2 Smartphone Manufacturer Spot in 1H18
by Andrei Frumusanu on August 3, 2018 6:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
Huawei has released its business results for the first half of 2018, and has posted new record sales figures of 95+ million units.
Most importantly, the company has now surpassed Apple in terms of smartphone shipments and has been able advance to the n°2 positioning with a global market share of 15.8% (It’s to be noted that we’re talking about unit shipments and not revenue).
Looking back, it’s now been 3 years since we had the opportunity to go to Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen and we had been presented the company’s business goals for the future. Back then the company very much stated that its medium-term strategy was to become the number two vendor worldwide. With today’s results, this marks an important point for the Chinese vendor as its efforts over the past couple of years have paid off.
Ever since my first coverage of the company 4 years ago I noted that there was great potential: It was evident that Huawei had great ambitions and product ethic, as it was able to recognize the faults in its products and progressively solve them over time and generations, very quickly iterating and improved its offerings. The threat to the competition as well as the disruption to the competitive landscape over the years very much materialised as a real thing, and today Huawei can be very much considered one of the leading smartphone vendors, not just in unit sales, but also in overall product quality.
It’s to be noted that Huawei achieved this while essentially failing to officially enter the US market. Earlier this year when talking to Huawei about the set-back in the US, the pragmatic response was is simply that the company is just going to have to focus on improving its products until there’s sufficient consumer demand to overcome other entry-barriers.
Business performance highlights
- HUAWEI P20 Series: Fusing art and technology, the P20 Series has been very well received among the fashion-forward consumers. The global shipments of the HUAWEI P20 Series surpassed 9 million units;
- HUAWEI Mate 10 Series: The latest HUAWEI Mate Series set the trend for mobile AI and strengthened the company’s position in the high-end market with global shipments of over 10 million units;
- HUAWEI nova Series: Globally, the number of nova smartphone users exceeded 50 million, contributing to growth of the overall mid-range smartphone market. Total shipments of the nova Series increased by 60 percent year-over-year.
- Huawei wearables achieved a remarkable 147 percent increase year-over-year;
- Retail business has grown and now Huawei operates over 53,000 Huawei stores and 3,500 Huawei Experience Stores globally. The company plans to bolster its retail network by adding another 10,000 retail stores and 700 Experience Stores around the world before the end of 2018.
The end of the year will be very interesting for Huawei mobile products as I’m expecting the next generation SoC to include ARM’s newest Cortex A76 cores as well as it being manufactured on TSMC’s new 7nm process, which after the last 2 generations of “unsynchronized” technology and product release scheduled will finally fall back into place and put the next designs in a very good competitive position that I’m looking forward to.
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SydneyBlue120d - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
Let's hope the new chip will have Galileo support and L5 support for both GPS and Galileo :)tokyojerry - Sunday, August 5, 2018 - link
What is L5 support?s.yu - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
"product ethic"?? Well that's new. Huawei's recent show of "product ethic" is to fake the P20 series' 960fps video using 240fps recording and interpolation.In marketing they're trying to brand some unoriginal use of heat pipes and overclocking as "CPU Turbo", while the so-called "GPU Turbo" with misleading claims bringing it to SD845 territory so far amounts to something akin to "Optimized for Geforce". And for that GPU Turbo they bought ads on international media sites while back in China they cite out of context with some misleading interpretation and portray their own ad articles as "high praise from major foreign media".
And then there's P20P's entirely fake review over at DxO, Anandtech's own samples and analysis, among others, already point out P20P's many notable flaws. If there's one thing Huawei doesn't have, it's ethics.
timecop1818 - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
I have P20 and it's the best phone of 2018 as far as I'm concerned.bubblyboo - Friday, August 3, 2018 - link
You certainly don't sound biased at alls.yu - Saturday, August 4, 2018 - link
+1s.yu - Saturday, August 4, 2018 - link
That's not disputing me. Is it possible for an iPX clone with a different color scheme and a cheap chin design to be better in some way than the original? Of course! But that's hardly a show of good ethics.On the other hand take a look at this: http://joxi.net/bmoBxNEI379B6r
And I won't go into how SD845 is better than the Kirin 970 in just about every way meaningful.
Saggitarius - Sunday, August 5, 2018 - link
I bet those samples of P20 Pro from DxO were shot in pre-release software. I have tried P20 Pro in person and portrait shots on this thing is nowhere near as bad as the one you posted, regardless of whether I use portrait mode or not. Skin textures aren't smudged and colours are fairly natural if a bit muted.s.yu - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Wow, some people claim just the opposite, that DxO had official firmware before everyone else. That makes more sense, if they're gonna give a score notably higher than any previous phone, chances are they were trying the best they could manage to back that up with samples to show actual imaging quality. Also go check out Anandtech's own set of samples, which was very recent, months after DxO, or GSMArena's or Allaboutsymbian's or Allaboutwindowsphone's. Basically in any sample gallery with full sized samples and comparisons, P20P samples done in good light smear more than the competition, it's not like this particular sample (which isn't mine, it's somebody else from DxO comments') is an outlier.Unless of course...they, and Huawei wagered that a score would be enough to fool gullible consumers. While this is dishonest practice, it's consistent with past Huawei behavior, and unfortunately they're generally right about that.
Saggitarius - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
"Wow, some people claim just the opposite"Well those people must be wrong/making false assumptions then. I've seen the samples myself and that's why I'm making this claim - Photos shot in portrait mode are noticeably better than whatever the crap DxO posted. So yeah, DxO's portrait samples are indeed outlier in this case and cannot be replicated in real life scenario.