Huawei’s 100 Million Milestone, Two Months Early!
No longer a “Chinese” brand, Huawei is clearly gunning to sit at the Big Boys’ table.
Just ten months into the year, and Huawei has already achieved it’s 100 million shipping milestone.
Huawei announced this at the official launch event for their Nova and Super Nova smartphones. This lands them on right next to the biggest global players, and it’s not their first time either.
The Chinese smartphone manufacturer has been doing splendidly in it’s domestic market, where it is undisputedly one of the top brands. Predictably, they’ve expanded quite aggressively into the international markets (primarily the South East Asian markets), over last few years and this has helped them garner significant traction as an internationally-reputed brand.
To provide a little more perspective to the 100 million number — it took Huawei the whole of 2015 to achieve that number. But with the expanded territories, in 2016, they’ve hit that milestone in just the tenth month!
The number does look quite impressive, especially when you consider that their shipments for the Huawei P9 and Huawei P9 Plus have been over 8 million, since the launch — with 6 million sales having been in under five months! Add to that, another 1.5 million sales of the very recently launched Honor 8.
Huawei’s always been a hungry, frisky brand. After having achieved 100 million unit sales last year, the company targeted a 40% growth for 2016. That aspiration by itself is quite huge, given that most companies grow under 10% annually!
But Huawei is not slacking off. He Gang, head of Huawei Technologies’ smartphone unit, told Chinese media that the company will achieve the 2016 target as expected, as its high-end and mid-ranged handsets have registered growth of 100% and 30% (respectively) over their last year’s numbers.
Interestingly, Huawei’s lower priced budget phones, on the other hand, saw the least growth.
Huawei is now aiming towards Western Europe and North Eastern Europe. According to He, Huawei’s sales in several markets in Western Europe and North Eastern Europe saw a boom in 2016, growing between 50% and 100% over 2015.
Poland, where growth was only a single digit in 2015, has seen over 20% sales growth of Huawei phones this year, he added.
What a lot of people are impressed with is that the company is not just focusing on expanding its smartphones and devices businesses. They have been expanding on their research and development centers as well.
In the last couple of years, the company has extended its R&D teams into countries including the US, Sweden, France, the UK, South Korea, Japan, and India, in addition to their centers in China — thus bringing their total tally to 16 R&D centers!
Chip-Monks is even more excited, that this milestone came before Huawei’s Mate 9 has been launched.
The Mate 9 is a phablet much-awaited for its specs. It is going to be available in flat and curved screen variants, the latter being the one driving more curiosity than the former. It is also expected to feature the company’s latest Kirin processor, along with 6 GB of RAM, a dual camera setup, and fast charging technology that takes the battery from zero to 50% in just five minutes!
The device is also rumored to have as many as nine color variants, giving the customers many options to choose from.
Whatever number we look at, we can be quite sure that Huawei, which was once deemed the fish of a small pond, is now turning into a giant great white whale that is all ready to take on the stormy seas of top-tier smartphone manufacturers!
Originally published at Chip-Monks.
