Smartphone shipments increase Huawei Lenovo challenges Samsung dominance

In the second quarter of 2014, China's handset manufacturers reported a significant year-on-year increase in shipments to the U.S. market research company IDC Tuesday report showed that Huawei and Lenovo from Samsung hands to snatch a lot of smart phone market share. Global smartphone shipments reached 295.3 million in the second quarter of 2014, up 23.1% per cent from 240 million in the same period last year. But two Chinese companies grew more aggressively, Huawei's smartphone shipments in the second quarter were 20.3 million, up 95.1% from a year earlier, while Lenovo's smartphone shipments were 15.8 million in the second quarter, up 38.7% from a year earlier. It is noteworthy that the current smartphone overlord Samsung electronic shipments are down 3.9%. Despite the saturation of China's smartphone market, demand for smartphones remains strong in many countries in Asia, Africa and South America. Melissa Zhou Melissa Chau, an analyst at IDC, said: As functional handsets die out faster and faster, Chinese manufacturers are ready to lead emerging market consumers into the smartphone age. Because these manufacturers of smartphones than the international top companies have a higher cost performance, and quality and scale is better than the local manufacturers, so that it gained a certain competitive advantage. Huawei, which has grown to be the world's third-largest maker of smartphones in the second quarter of this year, has further narrowed the gap with Samsung and Apple from 4.3% growth in the moves quarter of the same period last year. Meanwhile, Samsung's market share fell to 25% from 32% in the same period last year, while Apple dropped 1% to 11.9%. Second quarter global smartphone shipments to new heights Apple is usually in the off-season in the second quarter, as the iphone 6 release nears the trend, as consumers look to the bigger iphone on the screen. In the past few years, Huawei and Lenovo have been competing with Samsung for a share of China's smartphone market, but as the local market is saturated, the two firms have had to focus more on overseas markets. While Samsung's brand dominance has made it far ahead of the two Chinese brands in terms of market share, IDC's latest figures prove that Huawei and Lenovo have launched a strong challenge to Samsung's dominance. Huawei said in Tuesday that the rapid growth in shipments of smartphones benefited from strong demand from overseas markets such as Latin America and the Middle East, which have strong demand for new smartphones that can run on faster networks. Huawei says it is expanding rapidly in other emerging markets, although its handheld devices are slowing in the Chinese market. Smartphone sales in the east and Africa grew more than five times times year-on-year, while Latin America grew nearly three times-fold. Lenovo also accelerated the pace of overseas expansion, they have in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries occupy a larger market share. Lenovo also looks forward to the acquisition of the motor-ROM movement to boost their performance in global markets. This May, Lenovo chairman Yang said that they would use Motorola's strong sales network in North America and Latin America to sell handsets. In the United States, Lenovo plans to sell Motorola's brandMobile phones instead of using their own brands.