Currently being China's largest smartphone maker and world's third largest, Huawei aims to become the bigger smartphone maker in the world in the next four years.
Huawei's Ambitions
According to MacRumors, Huawei aims at challenging Apple and Samsung for the position of world's biggest smartphone company. Huawei's consumer head Richard Yu said that the company wants to grow into top two market share and to become the top one by 2021.
Up to date, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer is well on the track to achieve its goal. In Finland, for example, Huawei sold ten times as many smartphones as Apple in the first quarter of 2016. But in order to truly challenge Apple and Samsung, Huawei will have to conquer a key market where so far it has failed to achieve a big share. The company does not even make it on the list of top ten smartphones in the United States, trailing behind smaller rivals such as OnePlus and BLU.
One of the reasons of its low penetration on the American market is the fact that Huawei lacks agreements with the U.S.'s "big four" carriers: Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. The brand's visibility in the country is reduced. U.S. customers need to resort to Huawei's direct sales website or to retailers such as Walmart or Best Buy, in order to purchase one of their devices.
Huawei's Success
According to Fortune, part of Huawei's success is due to mastering a wide range of technical fields, performance that its competitors cannot match. Huawei makes products in every point of wireless communications, building the telecom networks, the chipsets inside smartphones and the handsets themselves.
The cash made from its networking sales is spent by the company on research and development in amounts more than its Chinese rivals do. This way, Huawei is keeping on the cutting-edge of technological advances and able to build handsets with quality close to that of rival Galaxies and iPhones.
The overall result of this business strategy is companies skyrocketing growth. Back in the year 2015, Huawei was ranking third worldwide, with 108 million phones sold. Company's estimates suggest that in 2016 its phone revenue jumped 40 percents to 178 billion yuan ($26.5 billion) and phone shipments 30 percent, to 140 million.
From a global perspective, Huawei has already become the most successful Chinese brand. But this surge was long prepared. Huawei took advantage of loans from China's government in order to build a network business in Latin America and Africa. Based on the experience learned there, the company was able to win networking-equipment deals with major carriers in Europ.
Huawei is selling now its newest devices for the networks in Europe. Company's share the European smartphone market doubled in the first nine months of 2016, to 12 percent. In the Netherlands and Portugal, Huawei has already become the top smartphone seller. In Spain, Italy, Hungary and Poland it is the second biggest.
Same as Samsung and Apple, now the company unveils its smartphones in shows in London and Munich, attended by hundreds of journalists. In China, the biggest market in the world for smartphone sales, the company's fight for leadership is also successful. For the first time at the end of 2015, Huawei took the top spot, passing low-cost Xiaomi and reputable brand Apple, after boosting annual sales by more than 40 percent.
