Gartner reports a smartphone market first-- Huawei beats Apple in terms of sales on Q2 2018, making it to 2nd place by selling 49.8 million handsets to end users in the quarter.
"Huawei’s smartphone sales grew 38.6% Y-o-Y in Q2 2018. Huawei continues to bring innovative features into its smartphones and expand its smartphone portfolio to cover larger consumer segments," the analyst says. "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."
In comparison, Apple sales remain essentially flat (0.9% Y-o-Y growth) in Q2 2018, as the company failed to increase the value of the current-generation iPhones. Gartner also points out iPhone X demand slowed down "much earlier" than that of other iPhone models, while stiffening competition from Chinese vendors and greater consumer expectations put "immense" pressure on Apple to deliver enhanced value with the premium iPhones.
As one might expect, Samsung leads in Q2 2018 smartphone sales with 72.3m units. In 4th place is Xiaomi, whose focus on portfolio expansion and a unified retail model bringing together offline and online retail leads to sales reaching 32.8m units. Closing off the top 5 is another Chinese vendor, Oppo, with sales reaching 28.5m.
In OS terms, Android holds 88% of the Q2 2018 market, followed by iOS with 11.9%.
