Huawei says smartphone shipments grew by 26% last quarter

Huawei is transitioning to a big player with premium options and already has concrete results to show. The company has shipped 16.8 million smartphones in Q3 this year and 26% of them were mid to high-end devices. It grew 23% overall compared to last year and 18% in its home country of China. The company also showed impressive growths in developing markets where shipments are up 322% compared to last year. The CEO is confident and makes comparisons with market-leader Samsung, which is having difficulty penetrating some developing markets where Huawei is ahead of the Koreans.

China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd said third-quarter smartphone shipments jumped 26 percent year-on-year, doubling devices shipped to the high-margin premium market dominated by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Apple Inc. Shenzhen-based Huawei, the world’s third-biggest smartphone supplier after the dominant pair, shipped 16.8 million smartphones globally in the quarter ended Sept. 30, according to company data. About a quarter of those were mid- to high-end models, more than twice as many as the same period last year. “We are breaking our bottlenecks of mid- to high-end models step by step, especially in overseas markets,” Huawei consumer business group marketing executive Shao Yang told Reuters in an interview. Huawei, like Chinese rivals Lenovo Group Ltd and ZTE Corp, is better known for selling low- and mid-priced handsets in emerging markets than high-end models in developed countries.