No matter what the report is, it looks like there’s a consensus: that Huawei really did overtake Apple in the second quarter of 2018.
Market-research firm Gartner has published its latest data for the smartphone industry, showing the manufacturer surpass the Cupertino-based company to become the second biggest smartphone vendor next to Samsung.
Huawei sold 49.8 million units for 13.3 percent of the global market share, up from 35.9 million units and 9.8 percent market share in the same period last year.
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“Huawei continues to bring innovative features into its smartphones and expand its smartphone portfolio to cover larger consumer segments,” Gartner research director Anshul Gupta said.
He added that the company’s investment into brand building and channels contributed to its growth. It helped that Huawei had positioned Honor devices well. With Honor smartphones now present in 70 markets worldwide, the sub-brand is indeed emerging as Huawei’s key growth driver.
Worldwide top 5 smartphone sales to end users by vendor in Q2 2018 (thousands of units)
Again, that growth was at the expense of Apple, whose market share decreased from 12.1 percent in the second quarter of 2017 to 11.9 percent from April to June this year. Gupta noted that the demand for the iPhone X has started to slow down much earlier than when other new models were introduced. Apple’s value as a company is another story, but we digress.
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While Samsung was still No. 1, the Korean manufacturer lost share year-over-year, too — declining 12.7 percent in the quarter. One of the key factors that led to its drop was the growing competition from Chinese manufacturers, especially Huawei, Xiaomi, and OPPO. The latter two took the fourth and fifth spots in the second-quarter ranking this year.
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