It’s official: Huawei topples Apple to become the second largest smartphone brand

Moneycontrol News 

Chinese smartphone major Huawei has officially beaten Apple to become the second largest smartphone brand in the world, as per data from Counterpoint’s Market Pulse for July 2017.

The maker of the popular Honor smartphones has consistently beaten the Cupertino giant in June as well as July sales. The report also predicts that if sales continue this way, a hat-trick could be on the cards for Huawei with its August sales set to go strong.

As per a statement from Counterpoint Research Director Peter Richardson, the rank can be attributed to Huawei’s consistent investment in R&D coupled with manufacturing, aggressive marketing, and sales channel expansion.

Established market players like South Korea's Samsung and US-based Apple may soon have to take steps to counter the rise of Chinese smartphone brands (Courtesy: Counterpoint Research)

Although the peaking sales is indeed a milestone for Huawei, with the iPhone 8 set for a launch on September 12 and its speculative features already creating waves around the world, Huawei’s ‘Honor’ of second largest smartphone brand could be short lived.

Huawei at the same time has a weakness in its global strategy at present as it seems too concentrated on the home market China where it already enjoys a leadership position and has operator-centric markets in Europe, Latin America and Middle East.

Key areas where Chinese brands are scoring in

Good design, manufacturing capability, and feature-heavy handsets and aggressive market promotion are earning customers for Chinese brands.

This similar strategy was followed by Xiaomi, Gionee, Oppo and Vivo in India with aggressive advertising campaigns, cheap pricing and consumer demand-driven features.

Another factor working towards their success is that Chinese brands have been able to reach out to key supply partners, launching designs with much-in-need features such as bezel-free fuller displays, augmented reality (case in point: Huawei Honor 8 Pro), in-house chipsets and advanced camera features, that have kept them toe-to-toe with rivals.

Though Huawei has become the second largest smartphone brand, none of its smartphone models, has broken into the top ten rankings of handsets in terms of sales globally.

The fact that none of Huawei's offerings score in the current top ten best-selling smartphones, reveals weaknesses in its portfolio, says experts (Courtesy: Counterpoint Research)

The lack of any of Huawei's handsets in any of the top ten can be attributed to an absence of streamlining of its product range like Oppo and Xiaomi have done - while putting more muscle behind a few products.

“While having a diverse portfolio allows Huawei to fight on multiple fronts, it does little to build overall brand recognition, something Huawei badly needs if it is [looking to] continue to gain share,” said Pavel Naiya, senior Analyst at Counterpoint.

While the world’s best-selling smartphone model still remains the Apple iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, Oppo has been one of the fastest growing brands globally thanks to the popular R11 and A57 smartphones, which are in the third and fourth positions by global sales.

Other devices include Samsung Galaxy S8, Xiaomi Redmi Note 4X and Samsung Galaxy S8+.