In spite of the numerous events that caused turbulence in Huawei’s operations this year, the Chinese smartphone and telecommunications equipment manufacturer has set a new record in 2018 by shipping 200 million devices. Considering that in 2017 they had shipped 153 million phones, and taking into account the stagnation of the smartphone market in general, this is an amazing feat by Huawei. This success was not based only on specific products that had wide acceptance such as their flagships (P20 Pro, Mate 20 Pro), but instead it’s based on an overall success across their whole product range, including budget/entry and midrange units.
Huawei was only a tiny player in the smartphone market in 2010, shipping around 3 million units back then. This figure is indicative of how much the company has grown since then, through consecutive market hits that have rendered it the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, coming second only to Samsung.
The challenges that were rooted this year, however, are only going to grow larger in 2019, as the US market regulators are anticipated to intensify bans of Huawei products, and the EU market is likely to follow suit. So, what is Huawei’s plan to weather the storm and come through another year of further market stagnation still strong?
The next year’s flagship, P30 Pro, will feature a 40 MP camera with 5x loss-less zooming coupled with the night-shooting-specialist Sony IMX 607 sensor. This will take smartphone photography into a whole new level, so premium consumers will be lured to upgrade. The rumors also suggest that P30 will sport a new curved OLED display made by LG Display to complement the upgrade. As last year’s premium features are rolled down to midrange models, the full spectrum of buyers will have a new reason to upgrade again, so theoretically Huawei looks strong for 2019.
As for the 5G network technology, the company is looking to play strong on this field as well, although the Canadian government who had agreed with Huawei to undertake the development of their national infrastructure is under pressure (by the US) to revoke the deal.
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