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Huawei Gave Its Blacklist Verdict By Posting 66 Percent Gain In Smartphone Shipments (forbes.com) 134

hackingbear writes: As reported by market researcher Canalys, Chinese tech giant and smartphone maker Huawei posted 66% annual growth, reaching a staggering 42% market share in China, which is the largest, albeit slightly shrinking, smartphone market in the world. A combination of keen pricing, technical innovation and patriotism has turned its strong domestic position into a dominant one, at the expense of Apple, whose market share has dropped to 5.1%, as well as other Chinese vendors such as Vivo and Xiaomi.

"Huawei is in a strong position to consolidate its dominance further amid 5G network rollout," Canalys commented. The Shenzhen tech giant knows that the impact of the blacklist is limited by unwavering support at home, where the headline loss of full-fat Android, its biggest international issue, has no impact -- Google's software and services are unavailable in China, while completely removing US-made semiconductors and components from its phones and networking gear.

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Huawei Gave Its Blacklist Verdict By Posting 66 Percent Gain In Smartphone Shipments

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  • Huawei might be better off going full local in the long run.

  • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @05:33AM (#59365112) Homepage Journal

    Huawei phones get great reviews. They have one of the best cameras on any smartphone, decent software and excellent build quality. They innovate too, getting rid of the notch etc.

    Their affordable models are popular in the UK, along with Xaomi, Honor and other Chinese brands. Much better than the crap Alcatel and Nokia put out these days.

    • by iserlohn ( 49556 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @05:57AM (#59365158) Homepage

      Quite a few things wrong in your comment.

      >Their affordable models are popular in the UK, along with Xaomi, Honor and other Chinese brands. Much better than the crap Alcatel and Nokia put out these days.

      The Alcatel brand for mobile phones is licensed to TCL, which is a major Chinese electronics manufacturer.

      Nokia is similar, but with the license to HMD, which is an Finnish company started by ex-Nokia people after the disastrous Microsoft acquisition of Nokia's handset business, their smartphones are usually well reviewed and most importantly selling well.

      Honor is just a brand for Huawei.

      The reason why Chinese manufacturers have been aggressively pushing overseas expansion is because the Chinese smartphone market is shrinking. Their prices won't remain low forever after this subsidised push because doing business in western markets is more that just selling on aliexpress or gearbest. The operating and support costs will catch up to them soon.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        My point was that from the consumer's point of view Chinese phones are the high end and good-but-value models now. European brands like Alcatel and Nokia have been reduced to cheap junk level.

        It's happened with TVs too. European brands that used to be associated with quality like Grundig, Alba and Hotpoint are down market crap now. New Chinese brands get good reviews. Similar to what happened with Japanese brands.

        It's happening with cars too. Many European brands, especially British ones, have a kinda bad r

        • It's happening with cars too. Many European brands, especially British ones, have a kinda bad reputation. MG, now Chinese, is getting good reviews though.

          It took China to figure out how to keep the smoke in the wires?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Their affordable models are popular in the UK, along with Xaomi, Honor and other Chinese brands. Much better than the crap Alcatel and Nokia put out these days.

      Beg your pardon? My Nokia 2.2 cost $150 and has a replaceable battery, a headphone jack, and Android One (meaning almost no manufacturer bloat and guaranteed 2 years feature updates 3 years security updates). Nokia's also pretty consistent about getting updates out at a reasonable pace. Not sure what your issue is with Nokia, I suspect you haven't u

    • Yes, but, can you guarantee that the entire phone isn't compromised security-wise right out of the factory?
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Some Western phones come with Facebook pre-installed.

        • Not. The. Same. Thing.
        • Not the same thing, even if I hate Fecesbook/Zuckerbook/Failbook/whatever name you want to call it, and wish it would just die and go away along with the vast majority of so-called 'social media' nonsense. You have to know that I mean things like spyware baked right into the BIOS or OS itself, and/or backdoors baked right into the silicon or the PCB itself. Also, pre-emptive strike, don't sit there and tell me "well, all American smartphones already have all that so it's perfectly okay for China to do that,
          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            And why do you worry that Chinese phones might have such backdoors but are sure that Western phones do not?

    • I noticed that the "budget" segment of the smartphone market in the US has gone to the toiled after Huawei's brands were chased away. Moto and Nokia brands have become noticeably worse, specially in the quality/testing environment.

  • by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @05:34AM (#59365120)

    ...while completely removing US-made semiconductors and components from its phones and networking gear.

    Trade wars are good and easy to win.
    -- Donald J. Trump.

    Y'all tired of winning yet?

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Naa, the Donald will find a way to claim this is actually a big win for his great strategy. Truth, honesty, or actually forward looking politics is not his thing, after all.

    • Trump can go take a long walk off a short orange juicer but how much American content did that hardware actually have before? And wouldn't this have happened anyway, and probably not even over a much longer period? China has been developing their own processors for some time. They're not as fast as ours on a per-core basis, but networking is parallelizable.

  • by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @05:42AM (#59365132)

    China, like Germany and Japan before it, have been running neo-mercantalist trade policies for a long time now. This is where you run structural trade surpluses with the rest of the world in the belief that this gives you some kind of strategic advantage. Japan does it because it needs to be able to import raw materials (it has a small land mass for the population) so the govt sees having high-tech exports the world wants as a position of resource security. That makes sense. Germany does it because they are obsessed with post war austerity economics. China did it because it wanted to 'pull in' consumer demand stimulus that they could not generate domestically, and, perhaps more importantly, it wanted to learn how to make things (steal tech if that's how you want to put it).

    But apart from Japan, running a structural trade surplus is really quite silly. At the start, sure, you sell Mr/Ms American household some plastic junk and they sell you in exchange some of their mortgage debt, or the power plant down the road, or their best companies. But eventually you start running out of useful stuff to take in exchange for your plastic junk. So you have to buy worse and worse quality assets. Eventually you are buying negative yielding junk bonds, or massively overpriced houses, or treasury securities that the govt is quite openly printing money to compete with your purchasing of them. On top of all that Mr/Ms American household start getting upset that you own all their stuff, and perhaps start deciding to use their political vote to repatriate some of that stuff you bought.

    So what are you left with? In exchange for all your hardwork making junk for them, you have a bunch of overpriced assets, stuck 7000 miles away within the jurisdiction of the greatest military power on earth, or a bunch of paper IOUs that that same military power is busy inflating too worthlessness.

    China has wanted to turn its giant manufacturing engine inwards for a long time but doing this is no easy thing. In a way, Trump has given them a great opportunity to do so, because now as the economy grinds along trying to adjust to this new orientation, the Chinese govt can blame the pain on the USA. This will be far more palatable to the Chinese worker than some esoteric explanation about reducing the trade surplus.

    In the end this is probably going to be better for everyone, though it does seem that as China finds it doesn't need to engage with the west as much, it will likely turn much more authoritarian (i.e. more like a North Korea). Given the US is still the military power to boot and won't be challenged on that for a while yet, that is really going to be a big tragedy for the average Chinese person. But for us in the west I do think it will similarly give us an opportunity to deal with the job automation 'problem' more seriously, and likely move towards a better place as well.

    Sadly at some point as China builds up its military strength it's not at all unlikely we enter another cold war of sorts. But that is probably another decade away.

    • Germany is doing spectacularly well with their trade policies. They're rolling in the dough. China is doing better than it ever has in its 5000 year history. Your predictions of far off doom seem farfetched.

      China blaming its problems on foreigners goes back to the incompetent and corrupt Qing dynasty, and won't change any time soon. It's better we stand up for ourselves instead of being giant pushovers. Chinese people respect that. Trump is actually admired for standing up for his own people. Obama was jus

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Germany is doing awfully. It's basically been forced for last 15 years to keep paying off the countries that it needs in Euro to keep it artificially devalued without getting the sanctions that usually go on currency manipulators.

        It's not doing it without reason either. Their primary cadre of hyper-productive workers started ageing out of workforce a few years ago, and will be out of it in a decade. And there's no replacement in sight. The fact that just a minor start of this ageing out that is already behi

        • Yeah, just keep predicting doom while Germany racks up budget surplus after budget surplus. They sure are doing poorly. Their people cared for by an expensive welfare state whole America picks up the bill for defense. I wish we were doing this poorly.
          • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            >Yeah, just keep predicting doom while Germany racks up budget surplus after budget surplus.

            Of course they do. Look at their demographic structure. They're currently at the tail edge of the massive wave of their large demographic bulge that contains a large amount of professional cadre of high paid 50-65 year old specialists, also known as the primary tax paying bracket of demographics, people who are at their top earning power and saving everything they can for their retirement. These are the people who

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      In my opinion, China started a cold war years ago when it decided it wanted to replace the U.S. as the world's dominant power. It isn't so much that they want to take over the world as it is they want to stop the world from taking over the Communist Party....a bit like the old Soviet Union and very much like Russia with its Klepto-ist regime picking up the pieces from the damage the Communist Party there inflicted on Russia. By picking up the pieces, I don't mean reforming Russian, Putin and his cronies mer

    • "China, like Germany and Japan before it, have been running neo-mercantalist trade policies for a long time now."

      Why is a neo-mercantalist like Donald Trump having such trouble dealing with other neo-mercantalists?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        The the feudal lords will be members of the party, not the serfs.

        Lenin was born a literal serf.

    • In a tight grip.

      Aka it being in debt with you. A lot.

      That is quite the lever to be on the long side of. No matter how powerful the US military is.
      Especially if you probably literally got more citizens than the US got bullets. ;)

      To me, it is all silly. Being dicks to each other only means harm. To them, to you, to everyone. And all because some big children are literally to underdeveloped at social interaction to get along.

      • Ask Japan how well that worked out in the 1980s. And no, you should "be a dick" to oppressive governments. They don't like you. They would kill you if they could. Grow up.

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          The best way to get rid of oppressive governments is to make their citizens rich. Rich people don't like being oppressed. Poor people are too worried about finding food. Maslow's Pyramid.

          • by G00F ( 241765 )

            It's a little bit the opposit.

            The well off (middle class) don't act as they are doing well. It's those desperate enough that will do the radical thing and fight the government.

            There may be some really rich people on the top of that, but with out the masses of people with nothing to lose, you got no foot solders to make things happen.

            • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Your statement isn't supported well by history. It's rare to have a violent revolution that leads to a successful, more liberal, regime change. The US has a bit of an odd point of view on that because the American revolution is one of the only examples.

              Even violent revolutions are generally fomented and led by elites. It does help to have some desperate people around, but they don't need to be all that desperate. The American revolution and civil war are good examples of that.

              • by fazig ( 2909523 )
                There's also the French Revolution (Era).
                But that bloody and violent period ultimately lasted from May 1789 to December 1848.
                • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

                  Yes, that's the classic example. France was sort of headed along the path that other European countries took, limiting the powers of the monarchy and abolishing Feudalism through peacefulish means. Then the actual violent revolution hit. After killing a bunch of people there was a dictatorship, then an "elected" council that killed everyone when they lost, then Napoleon took over and proclaimed himself emperor. After Napoleon was kicked out, *then* France got down to successfully liberalizing.

                  The revolutio

                  • by fazig ( 2909523 )
                    The time frame depends on which historian you ask.
                    I've got my sources from the early works of Hobsbawm, who gives a decent overview of the political and economic landscape of that time and how it changes in the process.
                    After Napoleon I was kicked out some other things happened. Monarchy returned again with the Bourbon Restoration followed by the July Monarchy.
                    Then the 2nd French Republic was formed with a proper constitution. Which again didn't last very long until Napoleon III declared himself emperor.
          • by Pyramid ( 57001 )

            " "The best way to get rid of oppressive governments is to make their citizens rich".

            How do you make that happen under a repressive, authoritarian regime that makes "1984" look like a "how to" guide instead of a warning? A regime that ultimately controls the means of production, regardless of how reformed and capitalist they want to appear.

            • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Well, western democracies all did it. If you think communist China is tightly controlled, you should read about feudalism.

              China itself has liberalized considerably since their communist revolution, and that revolution was a pretty big step up from what went before. Don't believe all the American propaganda you hear. As a citizen of a western democracy, you wouldn't want to live in communist China, but you'd probably much prefer it to any regime that went before.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Summary: trade surpluses are a terrible idea because you only end up with all the other guys' stuff.

    • You are wrong and biased in numerous points:

      This is where you run structural trade surpluses with the rest of the world in the belief that this gives you some kind of strategic advantage.

      China's trade surplus with the world is $383 billion [worldstopexports.com], but most of which is surplus to the USA at $323 billion. Therefore China's surplus to the rest of the world is only $60 billion, or 2.6% of its $2.29 trillion exports. Hardly anything "structural" whatever that means.

      Japan does it because it needs to be able to import raw materials (it has a small land mass for the population) so the govt sees having high-tech exports the world wants as a position of resource security.

      So is China [worldstopexports.com].

      China did it because it wanted to 'pull in' consumer demand stimulus that they could not generate domestically,

      That's true for any country, unless it can do what you describe later in your comment: printing "a bunch of paper IOUs that that same military power is busy inflating too worthlessness

    • Not really sure I follow your logic. Why wouldn't they just keep selling their plastic junk and stop buying our junk? You act like they *have* to buy our stuff.
    • But OPEC sells Oil only in US dollars and China imports 9 million barrels per day;
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
  • I guess we showed them who's boss around here
  • by lfp98 ( 740073 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @06:33AM (#59365250)
    Even if Huawei equipment is a backdoor-laced security threat, how does banning US software and hardware sales to it, forcing to make its own chips, address that threat? The US is simply giving up sales is one of very few areas China actually wants to buy something from us.
    • You should not sell stuff to your enemies. That's how. If they steal it or you're dumb enough to give them all your tech, there's nothing to be done about that. But there is zero value being dependent on your enemies buying stuff from you that you've already taught them how to make cheaper locally. This should be obvious strategically and economically. OTOH creating a dependency on you for critical items such as food (no I do not consider chips to be existentially critical to China's existence) is a hu
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's not just lost sales, it forces China to accelerate its home-grown chip development and manufacturing.

      Fortunately ARM isn't a US company so they can keep making ARM CPUs, but they have their own high performance CPU designs too now and of course there is RISC-V. Coupled with huge numbers of engineers and the advantage of being native Chinese speakers for software/datasheets/support, they can basically build their own market simply because they have more people living in China than the whole of the US, C

      • Fortunately ARM isn't a US company so they can keep making ARM CPUs, but they have their own high performance CPU designs too now

        Do they? They're in the third spot on the Top500 with 10 million cores, the first and second spot are both POWER9 systems, with 2.4 million and 1.5 million cores respectively. They only seem to have mediocre-performance CPUs from where I'm sitting, they have to use four times as many cores just to come in third.

    • It doesn't. It just inconveniences them a little, and the overall yield in silicon fab will be lower. But you're not wrong in a certain sense, at least if the West was fabbing their silicon, we'd have an opportunity to review the designs to see if there's any backdoors baked right into it, although it's more-or-less a certainty.
  • Some guy in China, some guy in the US, some, guy in Germany, or Russia ... at the end of the day, he's just some guy.

    We are all told tales of 10% and 90% imaginary monsters around the world. Mostly to our disadvantage.

    I should choose the overall best option. No matter where it is from and where I am from.
    Yes, teamwork is an advantage. But that is not correlating with national borders nowadays.

    Nationalism is the same as those buddhists that light themselves on fire. Self-harm caused by trigger-based reality

    • Total BS. If China took over your country they would cut your balls off and throw you in a gulag for not being Chinese. Stupid westerners think the world is full of rainbows.

    • ... at the end of the day, he's just some guy.

      What about the other part of the day ? Why do you hide/hate the other part of the day ?

  • This is "annual growth". This means it's for phones dumped before sanctions actually hit.

    It's well known that Huawei dumped essentially everything it could on the market when it found out that it's getting cut off, because you can't really sell phones in the West and a few other major regions without Google Play.

    Yet topic pretends really hard that this is about Huawei beating the blacklisting.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Dumped on the market? LOL
      Do you think they usually would have just kept them in a warehouse and slowly sold them a little bit at a time? They are one of the highest volume phone producers in existence. They make as many as they can and sell it as quick as they can and make more. High volume lower margins. Do you really not know anything about Chinese manufacturing?
      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Are you aware that logistics actually work on a distributor system, and yes, distributors at the end of long delivery chains have large stocks when it comes to major phone makers like Huawei?

        Because if you don't, you're going to have sell "out of stock" until the next container ship with this particular load arrives. And that's unacceptable image damage for a major phone brand.

  • Almost universally. Anybody with some clue about economics knows that. It has happened time and again in history. The person responsible for the current protectionist efforts against China has no clue about real economics though and makes the usual time-honored dumb mistakes.

    • That is complete Ayn Rand bullshit nonsense that globalists keep pushing but this case isn't protectionism anyway. Are you not aware of why Huawei is on a blacklist?

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I am well aware why Huawei is on that blacklist: The US telecommunications industry is far behind and cannot compete on merit. Of course, that is not the cover-story (i.e. "lie") used to "explain" things.

        • Total BS. If that were the case we would have blacklisted a ton of foreign telecom companies. Huawei is hardly cutting edge. There are a lot of cutting edge vendors out there. The Chinese government is dangerous and so is Huawei.

  • Who cares? If we didn't have the blacklist they would probably have had 200%+ growth. Yes, Chinese brands dominate China because the government makes Chinese manufactured products cheaper in China. Have you ever bought electronics in Asia? It is typically more expensive than anywhere else. And that includes Korea and Japan. Stop cheering on the Chinese government. They aren't your friend.

  • Sales of fearless leader Winnie the Pooh's favorite pre-compromised phone brand skyrocketed. Comply or your social credit will tank, your life will be double plus ungood.

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )

      As compared to US Hardware that is pre-compromised by the NSA? Heck someone is going to spy on me anyway, let me get the cheaper hardware.

      • by Pyramid ( 57001 )

        Essentially, overt authoritarian behavior is okay because more subtle versions exist elsewhere. Got it, you're an apologist.

        • by ghoul ( 157158 )

          Doing the exact same behavior is worse because its done by non White people. OK got it. You are a racist.

      • by fazig ( 2909523 )
        Two wrongs don't make a right, even if one of them can still be considered hypothetical.

        And that kind of reasoning is what we call whataboutism. And while dumb people really love that "he who is without sin cast the first stone" to quoque, it's still a fallacy. It neither asks for proof of the claim neither does it provide any disprove of the claim, it just deflects by pointing a finger at someone else (usually at the one who made the claim).
        It's also a fallacy because you use it as some kind of false di
        • by ghoul ( 157158 )

          While the Germans have provided clear proof that CISCO compromised hardware was used to spy on Merkel , there are only smear campaigns agains Huawei and no proof yet that Huawei hardware has ever been used to spy

  • During the Cold War the USSR learnt the lesson - doesnt matter if you are ahead in tech, markets matter. Eventually the country will the larger population (USA) will catch up and surpass you. Only way to keep a lead in tech is to keep selling to the large markets so that they dont develop home grown competitors. Wall off your tech from the large markets and soon you will be behind and in a generation you will be buying tech from the same large market country.
    With internet knowlwedge is freely available. May

  • While conceivable since China market large plus access to rest of Asia , as a private Company there is no independent audit like US listed companies. So hard to assess accuracy. The devices are nice usually much cheaper than Apple and Samsung comparable models.
  • As Apple's marketshare in China decreases, it becomes less important to them to bend over backwards to please the government.

    Next they need to move manufacturing somewhere else, and they can have leverage again. Assuming they really ARE shifting to services, they're probably better off not offering services in China anyway.

    Then again, this might just be outright bad for them, full stop.

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