Huawei Overtakes Apple to Become World's Second Biggest Smartphone Vendor in Q2 2018: Gartner

Huawei has overtaken Apple to become the world's second largest smartphone vendor in the second quarter of 2018, if a new report from UK-based market research firm Gartner is to be believed. This statistic matches the one in the report by IDC from earlier this month. The Gartner report also noted that the overall global smartphone sales grew 2 percent in the same quarter to 374 million units. The firm recorded more than 49 million shipments for Huawei and more than 44 million units for Apple in Q2 of 2018.

As was consistent with the IDC report earlier, Samsung maintained the top spot with more than 72 million shipments in the same quarter, however the South Korean manufacturer recorded a 12.7 percent decline over the same quarter last year. "Samsung faces slowing global smartphone demand and ever-growing competition from Chinese manufacturers," said Anshul Gupta, Research Director at Gartner. "The slowing demand for its flagship smartphones left Samsung with lower profitability. It now expects the Galaxy Note 9 smartphone to revive growth."

Back in May this year, the first quarter report from Gartner revealed a different picture. Samsung was in the top spot with 20.8 percent market share, Apple came second with 14.1 percent, and Huawei was ranked third with 10.5 percent share.

Focusing on Huawei's significant growth in the quarter, Gupta said, "Huawei's smartphone sales grew 38.6 percent in the second quarter of 2018. Huawei continues to bring innovative features into its smartphones and expand its smartphone portfolio to cover larger consumer segments. Its investment into channels, brand building and positioning of the Honor devices helped drive sales. Huawei is shipping its Honor smartphones into 70 markets worldwide and is emerging as Huawei's key growth driver."

While not having seen a decline, Apple's smartphone market maintained a rather flat quarter with 0.9 percent growth in Q2 2018. Gartner claimed that the early slowdown in demand for the iPhone X is to blame for the Cupertino giant taking the third position in the tally. Apart from the top three stalwarts, Xiaomi and Oppo took the fourth and fifth position, respectively. Gartner suggests that the adoption of a unified retail model, with offline and online integration, has helped Xiaomi secure the fourth spot in the second quarter of 2018.

As for mobile operating system market share, Gartner reported that Google's Android extended the lead over Apple's iOS with an 88 percent share compared to iOS' 11.9 percent.

New iPhones may well be amazing but will Apple follow a new strategy in India? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.