Huawei’s success in 2019 despite the US Blacklist
Despite the fact that Huawei Technologies which is a Chinese smartphone maker was blacklisted sometime in May by the United States from doing business with their suppliers, the company has recorded a shipping of over 240 million units of smartphones in 2019 and has improved greatly on the 200 million shipments it made in 2018.
According to Huawei’s official account on Weibo which is more like Twitter but Chinese, out of the 240 million units sold last year, 6.9 million were 5G smartphones. Huawei’s high end Mate and P series also had an increase of over 50 percent. Even upon the fact that globally, handset sales had declined drastically, Huawei which is of course the 2nd largest smartphone vendor globally still recorded growth to the tune of double digits in the 3rd quarter of 2019. They were in fact the only vendors out of the top five smartphone vendors to record this growth.
The rotating chairman of Huawei, Eric Xu in a new year’s message to their employees had the following to say, “We won’t grow as rapidly as we did in the first half of 2019, growth that continued throughout the year owing to sheer momentum in the market”. We can only speculate that this is owing to the fact that they are still on the US blacklist. Globally, the increase recorded for sales of smartphones in the 3rd quarter of last year was 0.4 percent but smartphones from Huawei Technologies recorded an increase of about 26 percent and this was due to the performance they had at the domestic market.
Following a separate report from IDC, Huawei has accounted for about 42 percent of the market in China for the 3rd quarter of 2019. This has cut market shares of other rivals like Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo. This year will indeed be a great one for the 5G smartphone industry in China as a lot of consumers have embraced the network which is like the speed of light and very next generation. The data rates are currently 10 times faster than what the 4G networks usually provide.
Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t have a 5G phone but we can only anticipate. Other smartphone vendors like Huawei, Oppo, Samsung, Vivo all released 5G phones in the previous year. Xiaomi, which is also a leading brand in China, is due to launch about 10 5G phone models this year just so they stand a chance to meet the rising appetite for this new technology.
Following an IDC note which was released in November, there’s going to be a shipping of about 190 million 5G-enabled smartphones this year. This will account for a whooping 14 percent of all the smartphones to be shipped this year.
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