14 DAY TRIAL // Huawei certainly has big ambitions from its phone lineup, and after overtaking Apple in terms of sales earlier this year, the company now has another big goal for 2020: become the world’s number one smartphone manufacturer.
Samsung currently tops the charts as far as global sales are concerned, but given Huawei’s rapid rise, the company expects to at least reach Samsung’s performance next year, ahead of a major boost in 2020.
Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei's consumer division, told CNBC in an interview that the goal of the company is to overtake Samsung and become the number one phone maker, all based on the same approach that has until now generated this massive growth.
“Next year, we will be very close to number one, maybe we will be on par with Samsung. And at least the year after, maybe we have a chance (to be number one), the year 2020,” Yu said, adding that continued investments in innovations can help achieve this goal.
“I encourage the team to have this innovation capability, to make bold innovations, to do something which some guy feels is a little bit crazy, to challenge ourselves and the industry.”
Investments in AI
Like others, Huawei thinks this growth could be powered by AI technology, and the company’s own chips are specifically designed to take advantage of this new approach.
“AI is coming. AI will be the engine for all the future services. AI will be elementary to working on many devices, it will connect all the apps, you can get all the services from this AI capability. The biggest changes in the next 10 years will be AI-enabled phones capability,” You continued.
According to Gartner data for the second quarter of 2018, Samsung topped smartphone sales with 72.3 million sold phones worldwide, while Huawei was second with 49.8 million sold units. Apple was only third with 44.7 million units. Huawei, however, jumped from 9.8% share to 13.3%, while Samsung declined from 22.6% to 19.3%.