Huawei's phone sales soar as sales of Apple and Samsung

IDC and Strategy Analytics have released their latest smartphone shipping numbers, and the big winner in recent months is Chinese Huawei, at the expense of the world's historic leaders Samsung and Apple, who have both lost ground.

Huawei is flirting with the status of the world's second largest supplier of smartphones for some time, having succeeded Apple for the first time in 2017, before changing back and forth in 2018. The improvement of the in 2019 seems to define it. with firmer control of the second point: Huawei has grown from 39.3 million phones delivered in the first quarter of 2018 to 59.1 million shipments in the first quarter of 2019, as reported by IDC and SA.

Apple's iPhone shipments rose from $ 52.2 million last quarter to $ 43 million (Apple recently stopped reporting iPhone sales in its earnings reports) for the same period. this year's period. Samsung rose from 78.2 million shipments to 71.9 million. In fact, without the flourishing growth of Huawei, the smartphone market could rightly be described as experiencing its own form of recession. US operators AT & T and Verizon announced last week that smartphone upgrades among their subscribers were at record levels, and other Chinese phone makers, such as Xiaomi and Oppo, are generally only holding numbers. of sale.

Other global brands that had a significant presence in the telephony market are also suffering. Sony's sales are steadily decreasing and the company has announced its intention to halve the number of its staff working on its mobile business. Last week, LG stopped making phones in its home country of South Korea, opting for cost savings by transferring its production to Vietnam. And HTC is still technically active in the mobile sector only because of the production of this crazy block phone.

Huawei is the exception and in more ways than one. The US government has very publicly rejected the company and has no presence in this very lucrative and developed market. All of its progress over the past year has been achieved on its national territory, China, and thanks to the successful development of its activities in Europe.

In the past two years, during which Apple and Samsung have been content with essentially iterative updates, Huawei has always made enormous progress between each device version. The company has invested heavily in its camera equipment, which has paid off with excellent performance (currently unmatched in low light) and prompted smartphone owners to press the "upgrade" button.

The goal for Huawei has always been to become the world's leading smartphone provider, which seemed to be overly optimistic only a few months ago. From today, it seems closer to a fatality. Huawei is planning ahead of Samsung by the end of the year. If its rate of aggressive improvement continues, there is no reason to doubt that it will be able to achieve this high goal.