Huawei Outsells Apple In 2019, Becomes No. 2 Global Smartphone Vendor (arstechnica.com) 22
An anonymous reader writes: Market research firms Canalys and Counterpoint Research have posted their 2019 global smartphone market share reports. Both reports say the biggest mover is Huawei, which, thanks to a whopping 16-17 percent annual growth, claimed the No. 2 smartphone vendor spot in 2019, behind Samsung and ahead of Apple. Both firms have similar global market share numbers for 2019, with Samsung around 20 percent, Huawei at 16 percent, Apple at 13 percent, and Xiaomi and Oppo around eight percent each. Counterpoint credits Huawei's success in its hometown of China for its success, saying, "This was the result of an aggressive push from Huawei in the Chinese market, where it achieved almost 40 percent market share." According to the firm, China makes up 60 percent of Huawei's shipments. "For what it's worth, Canalys has Q4 2019 as Huawei's first quarterly decline -- down seven percent from Q3 -- in two years, which it blames on the [Trump Administration's Huawei export ban]," adds Ars. "Together with the annual Apple Q4 surge thanks to the launch of a new iPhone, Huawei fell to third place again within that time period."
Profit (Score:5, Interesting)
And how much money do they make off those phones? How much profit do they make off of purchases from the Google Play store? Apple OWNS their entire infrastructure, from end to end. Selling cheap phones at nearly break-even is fine and dandy, but companies that live on razor-thin margins also die by razor-thin margins.
Apple and Nintendo are both companies that make money off their hardware, and off of their software. They may not always be thing biggest in volume, or gross sales, or any of that. But they are profitable.
Re:Profit (Score:5, Insightful)
From an Apple's shareholder perspective, of course what matters is the profit. And yes, Apple is a VERY profitable company. The best thing that could happen would be for Apple to screw its customers as much as possible in order to get every last penny out of their pockets. To do so, I suggest Apple continue to push for even thinner products, with non-replaceable parts (especially batteries), and as few ports as possible in order to sell as much dongles and proprietary chargers as possible. Also, future software updates should make previously purchased products as slow as possible in order to push new sales.
From a user perspective however, what matters is that the market share of walled gardens ecosystems shrink as much as possible (ideally 0%), so that we get our freedom back. In that perspective, I'm glad Apple's market share reduced by about 1% (from 14 to 13%, or 15.3 to 14.5% depending which report you read). That over 85% of the world rejected the walled garden approach in 2019 is a very good news for us. Let's just hope the trend continues.
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That over 85% of the world rejected the walled garden approach in 2019 is a very good news for us. Let's just hope the trend continues.
Or is it more likely that a vast majority of that 85% are buying cheap phones, potentially without any app store access at all? Not sure that 85% of the world has rejected the walled garden, but that they don't have access to a garden at all. Just my 2 cents...
Re: Profit (Score:2)
The vast majority of that 85% does have access to the play store. The Huawei minority must also have some sort of store.
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A helluva lot of those phones are feature phones, so there's not much a walled garden available to compete with Apple and Google.
Re: Profit (Score:2)
This is the smartphone market. 0% of these phones are feature phones. RTFS.
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If you make your margin too big you will open the door to competitors, make your customers disloyal and you want to share with partners as win win relationships last a longer time.
However if you are building hardware and there is a problem you need to replace it or return it to somewhere to repair it. you have huge production costs etc.
If you do softw
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Apple's phones have gotten thicker and heavier every iteration since the 6 or 6s. They did actually give them bigger batteries and the expense of thinness and lightness, what everyone wanted.
Apple also continues to have the best after-sale software support of any of the vendors.
You have some valid complaints, but those two aren't among them.
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The batteries are bigger because the phones are bigger (because people want large displays, the original fixation on 3.5" was a joke).
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Again, the phones are also thicker. No doubt some of the screens have been larger, but they didn’t make larger displays while staying the same thickness.
Re: Profit (Score:2)
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Profit is probably not their main concern right now. Market dominance is.
China, India, South America, Africa... Those are the places where all the growth is and where Huawei has an opportunity to establish it's own OS.
Even in Europe it's gaining traction. Huawei phones are still popular here which means the Huawei ecosystem is gaining a foothold.
Well, to be frank... (Score:2)
Every time we see news from the US, Huawei gains more popularity.
The times when we blindly sided with the US is over.
EU folks (not to be confused with Europeans, dear EU fascists!) think of themselves as their own independent thing now, and side with themselves and nobody else.
So USA, China, Russia ... all kinda the same to us.
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Apple and Nintendo are both companies that make money off their hardware, and off of their software. They may not always be thing biggest in volume, or gross sales, or any of that. But they are profitable.
I'll bet that Apple is the worldwide leader in phone revenue.
Chinese Backed Company (Score:1, Interesting)
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Also there's a difference between there, their & they're.
PS they make a profit.....
You don't get non-capitalist business models. (Score:2)
Not to defend Chinese morals ... their government is a real-live distopia ... but there is more to life than making a profit, dear Ferrengis.
China (or, imagine a sane version of Chinese pseudo-"communism") is about full employment. What you call a loss, they call a gain of jobs. I mean it's all internal money juggling anyway. All they are losing to the US, is "wasted" work that they didn't get money for. But if you don't care about that anyway, because you don't care about employees being paid, because the
If we talk about manufacturers, APPL is 4, not 3 (Score:3)
According to Counterpoint, Oppo + Vivo sold 233.5 million units combined. That's way more than apple's and a tad less than Huawei's. Because, you see, oppo and Vivo (along with oneplus) belong to the same company, BBK
So, if we speak about brands, yes, Samsung, apple, Huawei. But if we speak about manufacturers/vendors, Apple is fourth, behind Samsung, Huawei, and BBK.
The real news here is that Huawei finally suprased BKK, which has been the second biggest manufacturer since 2018.
How is Samsung so big? (Score:2)
Their phones are the definition of overpriced me(h)diocrity.
I think they are only popular "by default". They are bought "because they are bought".