The Kirin 980 will power Huawei’s Mate 20 Series that is set for launch this year.
Technology giant Huawei has said it is on course “to rise above all” in the global smartphone market.
Based on an IDC report of H1 2018 smartphone sales, Huawei took its place as the No 2 global smartphone vendor manufacturer, “establishing a new world order in smartphone hierarchy”, the company has said in a press statement.
While the industry was still abuzz with the news, Huawei marked two more milestones before the month was out.
The company sold 10mn units of the Huawei P20 series in the first five months and marked another “world’s first” with the launch of its new Kirin 980 chipset – the first commercially available 7 nanometre chipset that delivers “never-seen-before speed and efficiency”.
Huawei also took second spot in the Middle East and Africa.
According to the GFK May 2018 report, Huawei CBG’s market share in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) was 21%, an increase of 31.25% when compared with the brand’s market share in December 2017.
Huawei’s market share across countries in the MEA region exceeds 20%, including Levant at 37.4%, Oman at 30%, Iraq at 25% and Pakistan at 22.2%, among others.
The Huawei P20 Pro and P20 were the first two devices to receive a triple-digit score by DxOMark, the industry standard for camera and lens image quality measurements and ratings.
Today, the Huawei P20 Pro remains at the top of DxOMark Mobile leaderboard with a score of 109, a lead of six points above the second place competitor.
“Many have begun to call Huawei’s dominant innovation and unstoppable ascent impossible to outpace with its AI evolution that offers richer user experiences, better visuals and greater efficiency.
Leading the AI innovation agenda in the smartphone industry, Huawei’s AI on-device empowers users with everything they need to help optimise interaction and phone experience, without the hassle of downloading and engaging with multiple applications,” the statement notes.
With cloud computing (server side) primarily supported by AI, smartphones are in their evolution phase with on-device AI.“But with AI as a standard across all Huawei devices, we are headed to an era where both on-device AI and cloud AI will continue to converge and complement each other.
This, in simple terms, means that a device will be intelligent both on cloud level and its own handset level, leading to a future where mobile devices can serve as capable personal assistants,” it adds.
Huawei has stressed that its operational performance is “already seeing rapid and healthy growth and the brand’s influence is swiftly on the rise.
Innovations still to reveal before the end of the year will help it further bite into the global smartphone marketshare”.In the first half of 2018, Huawei shipped more than 95mn phones globally and ranked in the second spot in terms of market share across 38 countries, according to a GFK report.
In fact, with the Mate Series and P Series sales revenue increasing by 45% YoY, Huawei’s global market share in the greater than $500 premium segment has increased to 16.4% YoY.
“That’s no coincidence considering that the Mate 10 Series spearheaded the trend for AI and strengthened the company’s position in the high-end market with global shipments of over 10mn units in H1 2018.
Figures also showed that Huawei’s P20 Series, which fuses art and technology, was very well received among the fashion-forward consumers, while the number of users for the latest nova Series exceeded 50mn,” the company explains. The tech giant operates more than 53,000 Huawei stores and 3,500 Huawei Experience stores globally.
With a brand value of $38.046bn, Huawei ranked 25th in the Brand Finance Global 500 report for 2018.
The company is also projected to build another 10,000 stores and 700 experience stores this year as consideration from global consumers, measured by IPSOS, grew from 37% in 2016 to 44% in 2017.