Chinese Hello March Grows Stronger

Chinese oems led by huawei are wresting more grounds from rivals but absence of star models could be their undoing

- Shelley Vishwajeet

Huawei surpassed Apple in global smartphone sales consistently for June and July, according to the latest research from counterpoint’s Market Pulse for July 2017. of course, this was before the launch of Apple 8 but then the writing on the wall has been becoming clearer and much to the discomfort of previous undisputed leaders like Samsung and Apple. With August sales looking strong for the Chinese vendor, a hat-trick for Huawei is on the cards. the continuing good show by other Chinese vendors such as Oppo and Vivo too shows that Chinese are in there for a long haul globally. In Q1 too, it were Chinese makers only which had shown double digit growth while old war horses such as Samsung and Apple had struggled with near flat growth, though they continue to be leaders by a fair margin in terms of total shipment.

Discussing this key competitive development, counterpoint’s research Director Peter Richardson, notes, “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.”