Huawei smartphones said to be running rampant in EMEA

Research firm Canalys has made another confident statement claiming Huawei has increased its Q3 smartphone shipments by 70% year-on-year to 10 million in EMEA alone.

The team are seemingly not against making bold claims following last week’s estimates which put the smartwatch segment on a fast and furious rise through Q3, when the rest of us had assumed it was stagnating. We are a bunch of silly sausages. The latest research puts Huawei in third position in the EMEA smartphone market with a market share of 14%.

“Huawei is becoming much smarter in Europe,” said Ben Stanton, Research Analyst at Canalys. “It used to focus on price-to-performance ratio. This was a good disruptive strategy at the time, which helped it exploit falling operator subsidies, and the shift toward open-market channels such as e-commerce. But it has now evolved to become a major smart phone brand and innovator in its own right.”

Huawei has been making positive strides in the smartphone arena worldwide, and it would come as little surprise to most the team are eating up market share, but the numbers are not quite adding up for Telecoms.com.

Let’s look at analysis from a couple of other research houses (scroll down to the bottom of the article for the tables).

Strategy Analytics estimates Huawei shipped a total of 32 million phones worldwide over the course of Q3, and IDC estimate 33.6 million. Pretty similar between the two. Gartner haven’t released its figures to date, though they generally are pretty consistent with Strategy Analytics and IDC.

When looking more specifically at the Chinese market, Strategy Analytics estimate Huawei accounts for 14.9% of smartphone sales across Q3, roughly 18 million units. IDC estimates put Huawei sales at 19.1 million for the second quarter of 2016. Consistent, but not the same period, though as the figures for Q3 are not available yet you’ll have to give us some creative license.

Adding together the figures from EMEA and China, and subtracting that figure from worldwide sales leaves in the region of 3-5 million units. Still a substantial figure, though this is an amount which is supposed to cover North America, South America and the rest of Asia-Pacific minus China. That’s just under 4 billion people.

Now we’re not saying anyone is making stuff up, just seems a bit unusual. Huawei is growing strongly in the EMEA market, but it is also doing quite well throughout Asia as well. 3-5 million units seems to be quite a low number.

Canalys Emea Smartphone Tracker – Q3

Idc Worldwide Smartphone Tracker – Q3

Idc China Smartphone Tracker – Q2

Strategy Analytics Global Smartphone Tracker – Q3

Strategy Analytics China Smartphone Tracker – Q3