Market research firm IDC on its Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, noted that Chinese giant Huawei has surpassed Apple and become the world’s second-largest smartphone seller behind Samsung in the second quarter of 2018.
This is the first time in seven years that any contender has managed to split the top two.
Market analysts suggested that Huawei's surge came as the slowdown in China, the world's largest market for smartphones, eased, as well as an increase in market share in Europe. While Apple has been historically weak in terms of sales in the second quarter, the achievement is still significant.
It's impressive considering that Huawei was able to move into markets where the brand was largely unknown.
Overall, the global smartphones sales were at about 351 million devices in the second quarter of 2018. This is down 2 percent year-on-year due to market saturation, increasing prices, longer replacement rates, reduced mobile network subsidies, as well as lack of feature and design innovation.
Among the three (Samsung, Huawei and Apple), it was Samsung that was worst hit by the slowdown.
The South Korean tech giant had its sales down 10 percent year-on-year, selling 71.9 million smartphones for a 20 percent share of the market. Its flagship Galaxy S9 and S9+ didn’t sell very well, either. But its overall sales were able to keep the Samsung brand on top of the list.
Huawei which came second, sold 54.2 million smartphones, or up by 41 percent, for a 15 percent share of the market. The strategy involved the company in prolonging its Honor sub-brand to capture the middle-tier segment and Huawei-brand highend such as the P20 Pro.
The company said that overall, it had 15 percent higher revenue in the first 6 months of 2018, with revenue rising to ¥325.7 billion.
As for Apple, the Cupertino-based company sold 41.3 million iPhones, or up by just 1 percent, and owned 12 percent of the market share. That includes a large number of iPhone X, which sit at the top seller in the high-end category in many countries.
