The CEO of Huawei Technologies, Richard Yu has said that if not because of US sanctions against Huawei, that led to its devices and equipment being banned in parts of the world, Huawei devices would have surpassed Samsung by now.
Yu speculated in a recent interview that, “If not for U.S. intervention and suppression [of Huawei], Huawei and Apple could have become the world’s largest cell phone manufacturers. As we can see, Huawei considers Apple as its main competitor.”
Samsung has been the leader in the number of smartphones sold for many years and has successfully outperformed all competitors.
Indeed, the global smartphone shipment first quarter 2022 report from Canalys indicates Samsung is still the leader in the device market, Apple is second and Huawei is still out of the top five due to US sanctions.
But when asked about Samsung, Yu said “the others are small manufacturers, including the Korean company (Samsung), which can be sold mainly in the U.S. and South Korea.”
Recall that Huawei spent years trying to get closer to Samsung’s figures and before the sanctions were imposed, Huawei was among the top three handset vendors globally, and was confident that it would become number one ahead of Samsung and Apple.
Indeed, in April 2020, Huawei succeeded in becoming number one briefly, thanks to strong sales (40% market share) in mainland China. It surpassed Samsung by 2% of market share and achieved 19% of all global phone sales, while Samsung’s share was 17% due to poor sales of the Galaxy S20 series.
It is impossible to know how things would have turned out if the US had not blacklisted Huawei. But the fact remains that, despite Yu’s speculation, Samsung continues to lead and Huawei continues to fall lower and lower.
Huawei’s Chinese rival, Xiaomi has since joined Samsung and Apple in the top three, while two other Chinese brands, Oppo and Vivo have also joined the three to make up the top five as indicated in the Canalys report above.
