Apple toppled from world’s second largest smartphone company ranking by Huawei

Huawei continued its meteoric rise as they finally overtook Apple to become the second biggest smartphone company by sales. This feat was achieved for the months of June and July this year. This came as no surprise though as Huawei has been catching up the last several quarters.

Huawei has smartphones to cater for all kinds of users and budgets, all of their products running the Android operating system. It is the low budget smartphones that sell the most but offer the smallest profit margins.

The company recently announced that they are going to be scaling back on these low end smartphones as they are not contributing enough to group profits. This will probably lead to lower overall sales as high end phones are unlikely to sell in the millions that the low end phones could be sold. This would see Apple reclaim second position.

Included in Huawei’s figures are sales of Honor, a sub-brand of the company. Honor was first established to compete in the budget space in China but the brand is now available in several other markets. Honor smartphones, like OnePlus, offer high end specs with mid range pricing.

What is interesting is that of the 10 best selling smartphone models none of them was made by Huawei. 7 of the top models were iPhones and Galaxies, Oppo and Xiaomi being the only other manufactures with models in the top 10. This means Huawei does not have a single device driving sales but rather many models selling moderately well.

Samsung retained top spot with a global market share of about 20%. Huawei and Apple each had around 11% for the months of June and July. Oppo and Vivo rounded up the top five as Chinese brands continue to perform well. One in three smartphones shipped in the two months was from a Chinese manufacturer.

Revenue market share is a different story however with Apple dominating and Samsung a distant second. For years now, Apple (consistently accounting for over 90% of smartphone revenue) and Samsung (around 15%) have claimed over 100% of global smartphone revenues. This is possible because some manufacturers are actually making losses.

Apple is due to launch a new iPhone soon and this coupled with Huawei scaling back on low end phones means Apple is probably going to regain second spot on smartphone market share by sales volume. This however does not take anything away from Huawei’s rise.