Huawei overtakes Samsung as top smartphone seller: industry tracker

BEIJING - China's Huawei has overtaken Samsung to become the number-one smartphone seller worldwide in the second quarter on the back of strong domestic demand, industry tracker Canalys said Thursday.

Canalys said the embattled firm, which is facing US sanctions and falling overseas sales, shipped 55.8 million devices -- overtaking Samsung for the first time, which shifted 53.7 million units.

The findings marked the first quarter in nine years that a company other than Samsung or Apple has led the market, Canalys said.

US sanctions had "stifled" Huawei's business outside mainland China, the research group added, but it had grown to dominate its substantial home market.

More than 70 percent of Huawei smartphones are now sold in the country, Canalys said, where Samsung has a very small share of the market.

Huawei said in a statement it was a sign of "exceptional resilience".

Overseas shipments, however, fell nearly a third in the second quarter and Canalys analyst Mo Jia warned that strength in China alone "will not be enough to sustain Huawei at the top once the global economy starts to recover".

"Its major channel partners in key regions, such as Europe, are increasingly wary of ranging Huawei devices, taking on fewer models, and bringing in new brands to reduce risk," Mo said.

Huawei -- the world's top producer of telecoms networking equipment -- has become a pivotal issue in the geopolitical standoff between Beijing and Washington, which claims the firm poses a significant cybersecurity threat. 

GLOBAL TENSIONS

Washington has essentially barred Huawei from the US market and waged a global campaign to isolate the company.

The British government bowed to growing US pressure and pledged earlier this month to remove Huawei from its 5G network by 2027, despite warnings of retaliation from Beijing.

The politically-fraught change requires companies to stop buying new 5G equipment from Huawei starting next year and strip out existing gear by the end of 2027.

On Wednesday the US ambassador in Brasilia warned of "consequences" if Brazil chooses Huawei for the project to develop the next generation of telecommunications technology in Latin America's most populous country.

Australia and Japan have taken steps to block or restrict the Chinese company's participation in their 5G rollouts, and European telecoms operators including Norway's Telenor and Sweden's Telia have passed over Huawei as a supplier.

The US has also requested the extradition of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on fraud charges, further damaging relations between China and Canada, where she is under house arrest.

Meng, the Chinese telecom giant's chief financial officer, was arrested on a US warrant in December 2018 during a stopover in Vancouver and has been fighting extradition ever since.

Agence France-Presse

Phonemakers pile in to exploit Samsung weakness

BARCELONA - Phonemakers are piling in to fill a gap in the market left by Samsung, still licking its wounds from a costly recall of its flagship Note 7 and with no key device of its own to launch at the telecom industry's biggest annual fair.

China's Huawei, the most likely contender to fill the hole in the premium end of the market, took the wraps off a new phone in its quest to displace Samsung as the world's no. 2 smartphone maker after Apple, during a rush of new product releases on Sunday ahead of this week's World Mobile Congress.

Chinese challengers Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo and Gionee are in hot pursuit, while BlackBerry and Nokia announced models exploiting their retro appeal.

Samsung itself presented two new tablets pending the launch of its next flagship device, the Galaxy S8, expected now at the end of March rather than at Mobile World Congress, its usual showcase.

"The past six months have undoubtedly been one of the most challenging periods of our history," Samsung's European marketing chief David Lowes told a news conference in Barcelona. "We're determined to learn every possible lesson."

Samsung withdrew the Galaxy Note 7 last October after faulty batteries led some devices to catch fire, leading to a loss of consumer trust, wiping out more than $5 billion of operating profit, and allowing the iPhone to overtake it in sales.

"The competition is feisty but I think we have a good chance," Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei's consumer business group, told Reuters in an interview.

Samsung's smartphone market share dropped to 17.7 percent in the fourth quarter, while Apple's rose to 17.8 percent, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.

Independent research analyst Richard Windsor of Radio Free Mobile doubts whether Samsung can quickly regain its position.

"Samsung has taken a massive $5.4 billion hit to profits, apologized profusely for the recall and admitted shortcomings in its quality and assurance process but I don't think that the full effects of this issue have fully hit home," he wrote in a blog post.

He pointed to a survey from Harris Poll which shows that Samsung's reputation has fallen from No. 7 in the United States to No. 42, just one position above the US Postal Service.

Huawei has aggressively expanded its mid- to high-end phones and is going head to head in Asia and Europe with Apple and Samsung in the premium phone market.

Its new high-end P10 phone will go on sale from March at 649 euros ($685) in Europe, its key target market, likely ahead of the expected Samsung S8 launch.

Huawei, which made its name as a builder of telecom networks and only entered the phone market this decade, has made no secret of its ambition to be the world's number two.

But fortunes can change rapidly in the smartphone market, with little-known names in the West pushing established Asian players such as ZTE, LG Electronics and Lenovo-Motorola into the second tier.

Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi are now the fourth, fifth and sixth-biggest smartphone makers in the world, according to Strategy Analytics, with Sony number 16, and HTC in 20th place.

"The long game in smartphones simply is a marketing game," said Tim Coulling, an analyst at research firm Canalys.

source: news.abs-cbn.com