Huawei’s global smartphone shipments surpassed 240 million units in 2019 as it fought off US blacklist

Chinese smartphone maker Huawei Technologies shipped over 240 million smartphones globally in 2019, beating shipments of more than 200 million in 2018, and making progress despite being blacklisted in May by the US from doing business with American suppliers.

Among the handsets sold last year, 6.9 million units were 5G phones, and its high-end Mate series and P series recorded year-on-year increases of over 50 per cent, according to the company’s official account on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

Huawei, the world’s second-largest smartphone vendor, was the only one of the top-five global smartphone vendors to achieve double-digit growth in smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2019 as overall global handset sales declined, according to recent data from research firm Gartner.

Huawei has warned that 2020 could be a difficult year though as it expects to remain on the US blacklist. “We won’t grow as rapidly as we did in the first half of 2019, growth that continued throughout the year owing to sheer momentum in the market,” rotating chairman Eric Xu said in a New Year’s message to employees.

Global sales of smartphones contracted 0.4 per cent in the third quarter compared with the same period in 2018 while Huawei’s smartphone shipments recorded an increase of 26 per cent year on year, driven mainly by a strong performance in the domestic market, Gartner said in the report.