Huawei Continues to Fade Away After Missing Top Five Phone Sales Spot in China

Research Firm IDC usually does a good job rounding up numbers about smartphone trends and sales in different regions and over different periods.

This time around, the firm has released some key statistics about the smartphone space in China.

Looking at the data, it emerges that Chinese brands did very well, save for Huawei.

The results are for the second quarter of 2021.

According to the ranking, the leading smartphone brand in the Asian country is vivo.

The brand is under the BBK Electronics umbrella, which is the same company that owns OPPO and OnePlus, among others.

The second best-selling brand was OPPO, followed by Xiaomi, Apple, and Honor.

To note, Xiaomi is the best-selling Chinese brand in the world and overcame Huawei just the other day.

Heck, Xiaomi is only a few points behind market leader Samsung.

Honor used to be a Huawei subsidiary, but it has since been sold.

The development means that the company is allowed to use American components and services, meaning its future phones will ship with Google services as revealed earlier on.

It is also interesting that Samsung is not on the list; instead, it has been bunched in the Others segment among other players like the aforementioned Huawei.

While the top companies saw sales volumes balloon, Honor only managed to sell half the units it did in 2020.

Of course, Honor had slowed down the production of phones thanks to the US ban, so there weren’t many devices to hit store shelves.

It has also emerged that customers are no longer attracted to ‘innovation’ as was in the past. Rather, people are buying phones because of brand loyalty that they can relate to.

Effectively, this means that the majority of customers are no longer swayed by hardware innovation or software polish.

It also portrays a market that is nearing saturation, with most people being locked into brands that they have subscribed to in the past.