Huawei’s quickly closing the global phone sales gap to Samsung

Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo — the big three Chinese smartphone makers — just can’t stop selling devices. This according to global sales data from Gartner.

The research firm, in its Q3 2018 smartphone sales report, revealed that the trio helped push global smartphone sales to beyond 389-million units.

While Samsung remained the world’s biggest smartphone seller, pushing 73.3-million units in the quarter, its overall market share fell by 3.4% year-on-year.

Huawei saw substantial growth, from owning 9.5% of the global market share in Q3 2017 to 13.4% in Q2 2018. It sold more than 15-million more units during this period than last.

“The gap between Samsung and Huawei continues to shrink, as Huawei expands aggressively by investing in branding and distribution in the emerging markets of the Middle East, Asia/Pacific and Africa,” noted Anshul Gupta, a research director at Gartner.

“Huawei is, for example, aggressively positioning its affordable Honor series smartphones to drive the shift from feature phones to smartphones in those markets.”

One company not focusing on this conversion is Apple. The Cupertino firm remained third, quietly owning 11.8% of the global market share pie.

Xiaomi and Oppo sold a collective 63.7-million devices in Q3 2018, up from 56.2-million a year before.

Feature image: Huawei