Huawei has overtaken Apple for the first time ever to become the world’s second biggest smartphone company.
That’s according to analyst giant Gartner, who broadcast the revelation in its latest second quarter (Q2) smartphone sales report, released on Tuesday.
After seeing a massive growth of almost 40 percent in Q2 2018, Huawei took Apple’s silver medal, nudging the Cupertino firm to third place in the world’s smartphone leaderboard.
Research director at Gartner, Anshul Gupta , said the reason for the shift in leadership is that Huawei "continues to bring innovative features into its smartphones" and expand its device portfolio to cover larger consumer segments.
"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," Gupta said.
While Apple got elbowed down the leaderboard, it still saw growth in the quarter, albeit a tiny one percent.
This slow growth, Gupta said, is down to flailing demand for the iPhone X , which he said slowed down much earlier than when the firm introduced other new models in previous years.
"Growing competition from Chinese brands and consumers’ greater expectations for phone value is putting immense pressure on Apple to deliver enhanced value on their premium iPhones to foster growth," added Gupta.
The top spot is still secured by South Korean phone maker Samsung, who maintained the number one spot in Q2 despite seeing a decline of sales of just under 13 percent.
Gartner believes this is because Samsung faces slowing global smartphone demand and ever-growing competition from Chinese manufacturers, such as Huawei.
"The slowing demand for its flagship smartphones left Samsung with lower profitability," added Gupta. "It now expects the Note 9 smartphone to revive growth."
As for smartphone operating systems , Google ’s Android further extended its lead over Apple’s iOS in the second quarter of 2018, securing 88 percent market share to 11.9 percent share for iOS (see Table 2)
Nevertheless, Gartners’ smartphone report proved good news for the industry as a whole, showing that we are still buying smartphones like nobody’s busienss..
It stated that sales of handsets across the world grew by two percent in the quarter, to a whopping 374 million units.
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