Huawei Surpasses Apple as the World’s Second Largest Smartphone Brand

For many years now, Samsung and Apple have always been the top two smartphone manufacturers in the world, however, it looks like things have changed a little. According to research, Huawei has surpassed Apple as the world’s second largest smartphone brand, in June and July at least.

Counterpoint’s Market Pulse for July 2017 reports that “Huawei has surpassed Apple in global smartphone sales consistently for June and July”. The research firm adds that sales for August looks strong for the Chinese company as well.

“This is a significant milestone for Huawei, the largest Chinese smartphone brand with a growing global presence. It speaks volumes for this primarily network infrastructure vendor on how far it has grown in the consumer mobile handset space in the last three to four years. The global scale Huawei has been able to achieve can be attributed to its consistent investment in R&D and manufacturing, coupled with aggressive marketing and sales channel expansion.” – Peter Richardson, Counterpoint’s Research Director.

This is without a doubt a very exciting period for Huawei, however, since the iPhone 8 announcement is only a couple of days away, Apple is likely to gain back its spot in September 2017. Nevertheless, Huawei is still performing very well considering how its weak presence in South Asia, India, and North America is limiting its potential.

Interestingly though, in the same report, Counterpoint says that the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are the world’s best selling smartphones, with 4% and 2.9% sales market share respectively. This is followed by Oppo R11, Oppo A57, and Samsung Galaxy S8 in the third to fifth position. Xiaomi Redmi Note 4X, Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, iPhone 6, Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime and Samsung Galaxy A5 2017 takes the sixth to tenth positions.

Surprisingly, none of Huawei’s smartphones made it to the top ten list. Counterpoint says that this is due to “multiple SKU portfolio that currently lacks a true hero device”. The research firm also points out that Huawei needs to do something about this to help the company continue to gain share.