China's Huawei Technologies Co. said its smartphone shipments
rose 62% in the first half of this year, helped by strong demand in
overseas markets such as Latin America and the Middle East for new
handsets that work on faster-speed networks.
The first-half results make Huawei one of the fastest-growing
players in the global smartphone market. Earlier this month, market
leader Samsung Electronics Co. said it expected a decline in
operating profit in the second quarter due to sluggish smartphone
sales.
Huawei shipped 34.27 million smartphones world-wide in the six
months through June, the company said Tuesday. Growth accelerated
in the second quarter, when it shipped 20.56 million smartphones,
the company said.
While China's smartphone market--the largest for Huawei's
handset business--is showing signs of slower growth, Huawei is
expanding rapidly in emerging markets abroad. The company said its
smartphone shipments in the Middle East and Africa increased more
than sixfold from a year earlier, while shipments in Latin America
rose nearly fourfold. In Europe and the Asian-Pacific region,
excluding China, shipments more than doubled, it said.
To make its name more recognized by consumers abroad, Huawei has
been spending more on international marketing, mainly through
sponsorship deals with professional soccer teams in Europe, such as
the U.K.'s Arsenal Football Club and Italy's AC Milan.
Huawei said it is also trying to sell more mid- to high-end
smartphones, rather than selling the cheapest phones on the market.
In May, Huawei launched its new flagship smartphone, the Ascend P7,
which comes with a 5-inch screen and a camera feature designed
specifically for taking group self-portraits. On Tuesday, Huawei
said it has sold nearly two million units of the Ascend P7 so
far.
Shenzhen-based Huawei, whose main business is selling
telecommunications equipment to carriers, is trying to sell more
handsets to challenge the dominance of Samsung and Apple Inc. Even
though Huawei was the world's third-largest smartphone vendor in
the first quarter, according to research firm IDC, its market share
of 5% was still far behind those of Samsung and Apple. In China,
the world's largest smartphone market, Huawei faces tough
competition not only from Samsung and Apple but from other Chinese
handset vendors such as Lenovo Group Ltd. and Xiaomi Inc.
Earlier this month, Richard Yu, the head of Huawei's consumer
business group, said in an internal memo that revenue for his
group, which mainly sells smartphones, rose 30% in the first half
of this year. In the memo, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Mr.
Yu also said that his group by midyear had already achieved more
than half of its 2014 profit target. Huawei has said previously
that its smartphone business is profitable, but it hasn't disclosed
specific figures.
Write to Juro Osawa at juro.osawa@wsj.com
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