Huawei inches closer to Apple in smartphone shipments

Huawei Technologies Co Ltd said on Wednesday that it will ship nearly 200 million units of smartphones this year, close to its arch rival Apple's 200 to 210 million annual shipments.

Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business group, said "We will ship about 200 million units of smartphones this year, up from 153 million units last year, thanks to the growing popularity overseas."

On Wednesday, Huawei also unveiled a new technology which it claimed can boost smartphones' image processing efficiency by 60 percent while lowering down chip energy consumption by 30 percent.

Yu said GPU Turbo, as the new technology is called, is part of Huawei's intensified push to beef up spending on research and development. "GPU Turbo can help our low-to-middle-range smartphones to have the performance roughly as good as rivals' premium devices," he added.

In the first quarter of 2018, Huawei shipped 39.3 million units of smartphones worldwide, with its global market share hitting a new high of 11.8 percent. Huawei has maintained the line between keeping a strong domestic position while slowly upscaling its brand image in international markets with dividends paying off as its growth rate reached 13.8 percent year over year, beating the global average of 2.9 percent decline, according to market research company International Data Corp.

"Outside of China, Huawei is growing and gaining market share across the Western Europe region, an otherwise declining market, and is particularly strong in Spain, Germany, and Italy," IDC said in a research note.

According to IDC, though Huawei's high-end smartphones are popular in China, the bulk of its shipments are of the more affordable class of smartphones, and it also introduced a few new models in the low-end and mid-range segments. That is in part why Huawei introduced the GPU Turbo technology to optimize its cost-effective handsets.