Heena Sharma Blog

Huawei Technologies Co. overtook Apple Inc. to claim the No. 2 spot in smartphones in the first quarter, moving a step closer to its avowed ambition of displacing Samsung at the top of the market. The networking giant, shrugging off a barrage of accusations that it aids Chinese espionage (which it’s repeatedly denied), grew shipments 50 percent from a year earlier, research firm IDC estimates. It was the only name in the top 4 that managed to expand volumes as the overall market slid for the sixth consecutive quarter. Huawei’s been steadily gaining on Apple and Samsung Electronics Co with an increasingly high-end line-up of devices, particularly in its home market of China. The iPhone maker this week projected quarterly sales that topped analysts’ estimates, suggesting demand for iPhones has stabilized after a disappointing holiday period. Samsung also enjoyed a spike compared with the fourth quarter thanks to the launch of the marquee S10 range in February. IDC reckons Huawe...

Get comfy, this year’s smartphone market is about to get quite yawn-worthy. Over the past decade, we’ve seen phones get larger, faster, sharper, crisper and curved. They even put cameras on the front! Consumers have been blessed by the array of choices available in the market. But now the pace of innovation is slowing, and that could hurt investors. In China alone, an average of two new models were released each day last year for a total of 764. In 2017, that figure hit 1,054, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology . The saving grace for smartphone makers these past few years has been the addition of new functions, which allowed them to reverse a previous slide in average prices and actually sell devices for more money. Apple Inc. thinks that average sales price is more important than shipment numbers, which is why it decided to no longer tell you how many iPhones it sells but merely how much revenue it makes from them. Read...