Last year was very successful for Huawei, the company has not only managed to become the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer, but also sell 108 million smartphones. Huawei ended the year as the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, and the second largest in China, though it almost trumped Xiaomi. That being said, the company had huge plans for this year, they were aiming to ship 140 million handsets by the end of the year, but it seems like things didn’t exactly go as they planned, read on.
Huawei still has big plans for this year, but it seems like they decided to reduce the sales target, at least according to the supply chain sources. Sources say that Huawei reduced their sales target from 140 million to 120 million smartphones, mainly because the company failed to reach internal goals due to the high pricing of their high-end devices. Now, this doesn’t mean that Huawei has failed or anything of the sort, if they actually manage to hit the 120 million number, that means they’ll still have an 11% growth compared to last year, which is great, especially if we take into account that the Chinese market is quite saturated at the moment, and Huawei sells a huge chunk of their smartphones in that market.
Now, despite the fact their high-end phones are not selling as well as they’ve hoped, Huawei has still managed to sell over 2.6 million Huawei P9 and P9 Plus devices which were announced earlier this year, and that is quite a success for the company. It will be quite interesting to see what happens by the end of the year, but as already mentioned, the Chinese market is quite saturated, there’s plenty of competition there, and the company is definitely looking to sell as many smartphones in other regions, that’s for sure. Xiaomi and Huawei are still at the very top of the smartphone market in China, and that probably won’t change anytime soon, but OPPO and LeEco are also doing great and are stealing market share from Xiaomi and Huawei bit-by-bit. LeEco has been selling smartphones for approximately a year at this point, while OPPO has been around for quite some time now, but they’ve managed to surprise everyone when they released their sales numbers last year, they’ve sold 50 million devices in 2015.
UPDATE: You can see Huawei’s response to this report by clicking here.