Discussing this key competitive development, Counterpoint’s Research Director Peter Richardson, notes, “This is a significant milestone for Huawei, the largest Chinese smartphone brand with a growing global presence. It speaks volumes for this primarily network infrastructure vendor on how far it has grown in the consumer mobile handset space in the last three to four years. The global scale Huawei has been able to achieve can be attributed to its consistent investment in R&D and manufacturing, coupled with aggressive marketing and sales channel expansion.”
Mr. Richardson adds, “While this streak could be temporary considering the annual iPhone refresh is just around the corner, it nevertheless underscores the rate at which Huawei has been growing. However, a weak presence in the South Asian, Indian and North American markets limits Huawei’s potential in the near-to mid-term to take a sustainable second place position behind Samsung. Huawei is over-dependent on its home market China where it enjoys the leadership position and operator-centric markets in Europe, Latin America and Middle East.”
On future prospects and other findings, Counterpoint’s Associate Director, Tarun Pathak, notes, “The growth of Chinese brands is an important trend which no player in the mobile ecosystem can ignore. Chinese brands with their dominant position in key markets such as China, Europe, Asia and Latin America have restricted the growth prospects for leading global brands such as Samsung and Apple. Chinese brands are growing swiftly thanks not only to smartphone design, manufacturing capability and rich feature sets, but also by out-smarting and out-spending rivals in sales channels, go-to-market and marketing promotion strategies.”
Mr Pathak, adds, “Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi have successfully gained access to key supply chain partners, which has allowed them to launch designs with bezel-free, full displays, Augmented Reality, in-house chipsets and advanced camera features, that have kept them toe-to-toe with rivals. These players have become as equally important as Samsung or Apple to the global supply chain, application developers and distribution channels, as they continue to grow in scale more rapidly than the incumbent market share leaders.”
Commenting on the best-selling models in the month of July, Senior Analyst, Pavel Naiya highlighted, “Apple continued to drive its flagship momentum with iPhone 7 & 7 Plus; still the world’s best-selling models. OPPO has been one of the fastest growing brands globally thanks to the popularity of models including the flagship OPPO R11 and the mid-tier OPPO A57 that captured third and fourth spots respectively. These were followed by Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S8, Xiaomi Redmi Note 4X and Samsung Galaxy S8+. Apple’s 32GB refresh of the venerable iPhone 6 enabled it to regain momentum during the month, with popularity across prepaid markets to edge out Samsung’s Galaxy J7.
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| Best-Selling Models |
Source: Model Sales Tracker – July 2017
Methodology: Counterpoint’s Market Pulse is based on tracking monthly model-level sales for more than 300 brands across more than 40 countries globally.
Counterpoint Technology Market Research is a global research firm specializing in Technology products in the TMT industry. It services major technology firms and financial firms with a mix of monthly reports, customized projects and detailed analysis of the mobile and technology markets. Its key analysts are experts in the industry with an average tenure of 13 years in the high tech sector.
