Huawei has now taking the position of world’s second-largest smartphone vendor for a while, having taken over from Apple for the first time in 2017, before switching back and forth in 2018. The company’s improvement in 2019, however, appears to set it up with a firmer control of the second spot: Huawei jumped from 39.3 million phones shipped in the first quarter of 2018 to 59.1 million shipments in Q1 2019, as noted by both IDC and SA.
Apple’s iPhone shipments shrunk from 52.2 million in the quarter last year to what’s estimated to be between between 36 and 43 million (Apple recently stopped reporting iPhone sales in its earnings reports) for the same period this year. Samsung went from 78.2 million shipments to 71.9 million. In fact, without Huawei’s burgeoning growth, the smartphone market might aptly be described as experiencing its own form of recession.
Other global brands that used to have significant presence in the phone market are suffering too. Sony’s sales keep dwindling, and the company has said it intends to halve the staff it has working on its mobile business. LG last week quit making phones in its home country of South Korea, opting to lower costs by shifting production to Vietnam.
Huawei is the exception, and in more ways than one. The company has been very publicly rejected by the United States government, and it has zero presence in that highly lucrative and developed market. All of its progress over the past year has been in its home territory of China and through successful expansion of its business in Europe.
