Chinese device maker Huawei has shipped 200 million smartphone units so far this year.
According to a statement from the company, that is 64 days faster than it took Huawei to get to the same milestone last year.
Last year, Huawei shipped 206 million smartphones, the first time it had crossed the 200 million mark in a year and in line with its set target that year.
This year, according to media reports quoting its founder, Ren Zhengfei, the company had set a lofty and ambitious target of shipping 270 million smartphone units.
While this should be within the company’s reach going by its growth in recent years, the situation has been further complicated by frosty relations with key suppliers based in the United States following a clampdown by the US government on China-related entities in its escalating trade war with China.
This has seen the company’s latest products, like the Huawei Mate 30 series it unveiled a month ago, enter the market without Google services, a core part of the Android experience for smartphone users outside China and a gamechanger when it comes to consumer decisions on which devices to go with.
When it announced its Q3 2019 financial results a week ago, Huawei noted that it had managed to ship 185 million smartphone units by the end of that quarter representing a year-on-year increase of 26%.
Towards the end of June, Huawei announced another milestone: it had shipped 100 million smartphone units by May 30th. By the time the company was reporting its numbers for the first half of 2019, it had shipped a total of 118 million smartphone units.
To celebrate the 200 million smartphone shipments milestone, Huawei has launched a commemorative edition of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G. The limited-edition variant which packs a whopping 512GB onboard storage and couples it with 8GB memory, will be available for order from November 1st in China for a whopping 1,000 Euros (over Kshs 115,000 by current exchange rates). There is no indication that it will be available in other markets.
