The P20 Pro Android flagship is now Huawei’s most successful smartphone in Western Europe, the Chinese original equipment manufacturer said Friday. Four weeks after becoming available for purchase in the region, the P20 Pro outsold last year’s P10 Plus by 316-percent, with the majority of its sales being recorded in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Huawei is also pointing to Google Trends which is showing queries related to the P20 lineup among the most popular Internet searches in the last month, with the trend being fueled by consumer interest from Germany, Spain, and Italy.
The P20 product family also broke records on Chinese e-commerce platform Vmall where it generated over $15.7 million in sales revenue within the first ten seconds of its commercial availability earlier this month. Huawei is unsurprisingly painting the launch of the P20 and P20 Pro as a resounding success and a step in the right direction for the company that’s still seeking to overtake Samsung and Apple on its quest to become the world’s largest smartphone maker by both shipments and sales. The newly released Android flagships are being touted by some as the best mobile cameras ever created and are generally enjoying extremely positive reviews, though both handsets are still set to miss out on the United States, the world’s largest market for high-end smartphones.
Despite attempting to penetrate the stateside market for years, Huawei is still unable to do so on a significant scale, i.e. through a partnership with one of the four national wireless carriers in the country. The company came close this January when it was set to announce such a collaboration with AT&T but the telecom giant ended up succumbing to pressure from U.S. lawmakers and regulators, having called off the deal some 24 hours before the thereof was meant to be announced at Las Vegas-based CES, as per previous reports. Huawei is now committing more resources to Europe, currently one of its most promising foreign markets. The company said it isn’t giving up on the U.S. but isn’t expected to enter a carrier partnership in the country for the foreseeable future, with Washington still accusing it of being a national security risk due to its ties to Beijing.