Huawei has surpassed Apple to secure the second spot in the list of worldwide smartphone vendors in the second quarter of 2018, market research firm Gartner said. Samsung has topped the list while Apple secured the third spot. The overall sales of smartphones grew 2 percent in the quarter to reach 374 million units.
“Huawei’s smartphone sales grew 38.6 percent in the second quarter of 2018. Huawei continues to bring innovative features into its smartphones and expand its smartphone portfolio to cover larger consumer segments,” said Anshul Gupta, Research Director at Gartner. “Its investment into channels, brand building and positioning of the Honor devices helped drive sales. Huawei is shipping its Honor smartphones into 70 markets worldwide and is emerging as Huawei’s key growth driver,” he added.
Samsung maintained the top global smartphone vendor spot. It shipped 72,336 smartphones in the quarter securing 19.3 percent market share. Huawei shipped 49,846 smartphones capturing 13.3 percent share followed by Apple whose performance was flat in the quarter. The iPhone-maker shipped 44,715 smartphones having 11.9 percent share. The fourth and fifth spots were captured by Xiaomi with 8.8 percent and Oppo with 7.6 percent market shares respectively.
"Samsung faces slowing global smartphone demand and ever-growing competition from Chinese manufacturers. The slowing demand for its flagship smartphones left Samsung with lower profitability. It now expects the Galaxy Note 9 smartphone to revive growth. Minimal incremental value in Apple's current-generation flagship iPhones led to slower growth in the second quarter of 2018. Demand for the iPhone X has started to slow down much earlier than when other new models were introduced,” Gupta added.
In the smartphone operating system (OS) market, Google’s Android further extended its lead over Apple’s iOS in the quarter, securing 88 percent market share to 11.9 percent share for iOS.