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Huawei Takes #2 Smartphone Manufacturer Spot in 1H18 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.
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. Related reading: |
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