Huawei has announced that it sold over 6.9 million 5G smartphones last year, reports GizmoChina. Do note that this includes HONOR’s devices as well, the same as any other shipment info regarding the company.
Huawei announced quite a few 5G smartphones in 2019, more than the vast majority of other OEMs, if not all of them. The company announced the Mate 30 5G, Mate 20 X 5G, Mate X 5G, Nova 6 5G, and the HONOR V30 5G series.
Now, this information has been shared in Chinese, and there’s a good reason for that. The vast majority of 5G devices that the company sold, got sold in China.
Huawei and HONOR have a combined market share of 25.8-percent in China, as far as smartphones are concerned. Huawei, alone, is still at the top, with 15.36-percent.
HONOR grew quite a bit over the year. HONOR is currently holding a 10.45-percent market share in China. That is quite a bit deal, as HONOR is Huawei’s sub-brand, essentially, even though it’s acting as a separate entity at the moment.
China is still the largest smartphone market in the world. India grew a lot over the year, and is closing in, but China is still at the top in that regard.
Huawei sold over 6.9 million 5G handsets in 2019, and that’s impressive
That being said, the sheer fact that Huawei sold over 6.9 million 5G smartphones is impressive. We did not see that many 5G smartphones in the market just yet. 2020 will be a completely different story, as many more OEMs will release such devices.
5G is spreading, but that rollout is really slow. 5G will not cross the finish line for a couple of years, probably. And by that, I mean to become as widespread as everyone would like.
4G is still around, and that won’t change. 4G is still the standard around the world, and it will be interesting to see how long will it take for 5G to phase it out.
Huawei managed to sell 240 million smartphones last year
Now, as far as Huawei’s smartphone sales, in general, are concerned, well, it did great in that regard as well. Huawei managed to sell 240 million smartphones last year. It managed to do that despite the US ban.
For comparison’s sake, this China-based tech giant shipped 206 million smartphones a year before, in 2018. So, as you can see, this is a 32 million increase despite the US ban.
2020 will be an extremely challenging year for Huawei. Mainly because of the US ban which prevents it to include Google’s services on its smartphones. Huawei has been working on its own set of apps (HMS), to replace Google’s, but that will take a while. Replacing the Google Play Store is the biggest obstacle for Huawei. It remains to be seen how will the company handle that this year.