The year 2019 has been a tumultuous period for Chinese telecommunication giant Huawei after the U.S. Department of Commence added the firm into the entity list.
Due to their placement within the entity list, Huawei’s access to the U.S. supply chain will be restricted, unless the companies are able to obtain special licenses for trading with Huawei.
This is detrimental not just to the firm’s telecommunication business, but also to their red hot smartphone business.
To be more specific, the addition of Huawei into the entity list had cut-off Huawei’s access to licensed Google services for their new smartphones.
Despite that, Huawei remain upbeat in the global smartphone market. According to the latest report from Canalys, the firm had recorded an annual growth of 17% in 2019.
The total smartphone shipments for Huawei stood at 240.6 million in 2019, up from 206 million in 2018. Similarly, it’s global market share also expanded from 14.8% in 2018 to 17.6% in 2019.
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Based on the Canalys report, Huawei had overtaken Apple to become the world’s second largest smartphone vendor (in terms of market share) in 2019.
Samsung on the other hand, managed to maintain it’s top position as the largest smartphone vendor in the world with a global market share of 21.8%.
Although Huawei had recorded a top-line growth in 2019, but the majority of it’s sales were driven by strong domestic demand as a result “patriotic buying” among the Chinese consumers.
In the global market, Huawei’s smartphone sales continue to struggle due to the lack of licensed Google services.
To solve this pressing issue, Huawei has been working on their proprietary Huawei Mobile Services (HMS), and a swathe of Google replacement apps since last year.
Earlier this month, Huawei had also signed a deal with Dutch’s firm TomTom for the use of their mapping and navigational services to eliminate their reliance on Google Map.
However, Huawei’s success will largely depend if consumers are willing to adopt the new solutions introduced in their upcoming smartphones.
Likewise, as noted by Canalys, Huawei must also “curate a developer ecosystem to support HMS. And most importantly, it must maintain scale. If it loses scale, it loses developer interest”.
Despite the the difficult year ahead, Huawei’s founder Ren Zhangfei remains adamant that the company can still become No. 1 even without access to Google.
Source: Canalys
Featured Image: Huawei Press Center
