Huawei aims to be the world's biggest smart phone provider in 2017

Huawei is now ready to become the world’s biggest smartphone provider, within a year. This target seems more achievable, since Huawei gained 25% growth, both within China, and across all emerging and European Markets, during the first half of the financial year. Huawei now aims to surpass its biggest competitors Apple and Samsung in 2017 to become the leading mobile provider.

Huawei Consumer Business Group has revealed its 2016 half year financial results, stating that; Sales revenue for the Information Technology company increased by 41 per cent year-on-year to $11.6bn in the first half of 2016. Smartphone shipments stood at 60.56 million, a year-on-year increase of 25 per cent. According to the International Data Corporation, global smartphone shipments in the first half of 2016 increased by just 3.1 per cent, indicating that Huawei’s growth has significantly outperformed the market.

Speaking on the results, the Group Chief Executive Officer, Huawei Consumer Business - Richard Yu, said, “We saw particularly fast growth in traditionally high-end smartphone markets such as Europe and emerging markets including North Africa, Central Asia and Latin America.” Richard Yu further said: “[It] is a testament to Huawei’s long-term commitment to innovation”. "We are going to take them [the competitors] step-by-step, innovation-by-innovation.” He added.

According to GFK, by the end of May 2016, Huawei’s share of the global smartphone market reached 11.4 per cent. In China, Huawei continued to be the industry leader with the highest shipment total and a market-share of 18.6 per cent. Currently, it is the third-biggest smartphone vendor after Apple and world leader Samsung. In the list of global smartphone vendor shipments in the third quarter of 2016, Huawei succeeded in selling 33.6 million smartphones.

To achieve this goal, Huawei spends a massive part of its budget on R&D, already surpassing Apple in R&D spending. It seeks to explore more opportunities in ‘Artificial intelligence’, ‘Virtual Reality’ and ‘Augmented reality’.Steep growth has been achieved by Huawei, in both the consumer and enterprise business, despite slow market-growth. 

With the new phone, branded as Huawei 'Mate 9', Yu expects a breakthrough in European markets such as Germany, France and Great Britain. In Finland, Huawei is already number one. However, globally speaking: Currently, Apple is still ahead, with 45.5 million devices (12 percent market-share), while Samsung is the world leader, with 75.3 million shipped devices (20.1 percent market-share).