CHINA- Xiaomi Inc., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. Canalys reports that Huawei has overtaken Xiaomi to China’s top smartphone maker for the first time in history.
Canalys reports that its data from the last quarter suggests that Huawei has gone to the first place of the smartphone market, leaving Xiaomi in the second place – a plot twist that has never been seen before for neither of the two tech giants.
According to the research firm, during the last years an 81% surge in sales has occurred giving Huawei the upper hand. This interesting announcement came as a precursor to the Canalys’ official announcement for the full figures for Chinese smartphone sales in the last quarter of the year 2015, so this comparison is not to be confused with other tech colossal companies outside of China, such as Apple and Samsung.
At this point, it is also worth noting that Canalys is comparing sales in figures for Huawei – channel and consumer sales – with sales out – direct to consumers – for Xiaomi. A fair match, because that’s how they both do sales, but it should not go unnoticed.
Come to think about it, this change should not strike as a major surprise, since Huawei is really taking its game to the next level, with a series of very appealing devices including, an Android smartwatch, a smartphone with an Apple-like 3D Touch feature and, of course, the popular top tier Nexus 6P, designed for Google by Huawei. In addition to the Google deal, this is a rather substantial opportunity for Huawei to show off its capabilities in hardware to the US market for future independent handsets.
At the same time, Xiaomi seems to be having a hard time sticking to the plan, since the company had made a goal of selling 80 million smartphones this year (the number was initially 100 million at first but was later cut down to 80 million) and so far they have only managed to sell 61 millions of them.
In an attempt to justify this struggle, a spokesman of the company said: “We just released Redmi Note 2 in mid-August and Mi 4c in late September, which means our product lineup went through a transition period in Q3 2015, and we had to ramp up supply gradually to meet demand.”.
In other words, perhaps the whole incident is not as permanent as we might think. So stay tuned as we watch closely for the next step of the two companies and the latest news regarding the Chinese smartphone market.
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Canalys
Featured image credit: Alexanpob, YouTube
