Huawei has never been the biggest Android manufacturer around, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t do big business. Quite the contrary actually, as this latest earnings report has shown. Chinese based Huawei shipped a total of 34.27 million smartphones globally in the first half of 2014, meeting about 43 percent of their yearly sales goal. Seeing as how the fall and winter usually see bigger tech sales, this is well ahead of where Huawei thought they might be at this point in time. Right now Huawei is looking to sell a total of 80 million phones this year, and there’s a very real possibility that they could meet that goal and possibly exceed it.
Speaking with Reuters, Shao Yang, the vice president of marketing in Huawei’s consumer business group stated that regions such as the Middle East, Africa and Latin America saw the biggest growth for Huawei device sales. The Middle East and Africa showed a 275 percent increase over this time last year, and Latin America showed an amazing 550 percent growth over the same time period. These are some massive increases in Huawei’s sales, and it’s something Shao attributes to overall brand awareness and just general stronger sales channels and partnerships in these markets.
This time last year Huawei shipped 21 million phones in the first half of 2013, showing just how much they’ve grown in a single year, and how they could easily come to challenge the biggest of vendors out there soon enough. Right now around 20 percent of the phones shipped were mid to high-end smartphones, a jump from the 16 percent Huawei saw this time last year. While Huawei is still best known for their entry-level devices, we’ve seen that they can compete on the mid to high-end phone lines as they have shown. China is still Huawei’s biggest market, with 20 million smartphones shipped there, and they have a total of 4.7 percent of global market share. While is is dwarfed when compared to something like Samsung’s 30.8 percent market share, it shows that Huawei is an up-and-coming force to be reckoned with.