Huawei, the smartphone brand that has taken a heavy beating in the past couple of years due to trade sanctions that prevented (and still prevent) the Chinese vendor from using many technologies exported from the US, including the proper Android operating system, Google Mobile Services and the Play store, still appears on the radar in China, its home market. Huawei returned to the top-10 with the Nova 9 smartphone in the second quarter of 2022, after being absent there for more than a year, according to recent research from Strategy Analytics’ Smartphone Model Tracker (SMT). The top-10 smartphones in China are shown in the exhibit below:

With the successor Nova 10 announced in July and running the home-grown Harmony OS v2.0 like the Nova 9, it looks like Huawei will remain a significant player in China for some time to come, even if it’s not quite as big as the top-5 vendors Honor, Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Apple. These “big 5” brands all had between 15 and 19 percent market share in Q2, and each of them had a model or two on the top-10 smartphone list, except for Apple which had three models there. Huawei was the no.6 vendor, and all other vendors below it were tiny. Even if things seem to be consolidating with regard to vendors, China is still very fragmented as a market in terms of the various smartphone models being sold there.

Interested in the shipments, market share, wholesale pricing, and specs of the top-100 best-selling smartphones in China or other markets? Clients of our SMT service can get these, and many other types of data here.