Huawei hasn’t had a great time lately. The pandemic this year didn’t help, obviously, but even before that they were struggling due to trade restrictions from the US government. It looks like that’s finally starting to take a toll on Huawei’s global smartphone shipments, and things are starting to take a turn for the worse.
Huawei falls, Samsung claims top spot
Gartner’s numbers for smartphone shipments in Q3 2020 reveal some surprising and some not-so-surprising details about the state of the market right now. Samsung is still feeling good in first place with 80.6 million units sold, which is also an increase of 2.2% year-over-year. It’s always safe to bet on Samsung.
Huawei, conversely, is still number 2, but there are some serious warning signs. Their shipments this past quarter were down a whopping 21.3% from this period last year, and until those trade restrictions with US companies get loosened, it might not recover anytime soon.
Huawei has managed to stay afloat by selling their latest and greatest in markets that support phones without the Play Store, but otherwise they’ve been kind of sneaky by rebranding some of their older phones to keep selling them with Google Play and all of those apps and services that come with it. The Huawei P30 Pro, for example, got two revisions despite the original phone releasing in 2019. This technically lets Huawei sell something decent in spite of those trade restrictions, but even Gartner’s analysts don’t expect this to hold out for much longer.
In other good news for Android manufacturers, Xiaomi seems to have clawed the number 3 spot away from Apple thanks to their diverse smartphone portfolio and multiple sub-brands, and managed to achieve staggering 34.9% growth.
Read more: Gartner
