Huawei announced on Thursday that it had shipped a total of 240 million smartphones in 2019, which represents a 16.5% increase over 2018, according to the firm’s official Weibo account.
Huawei is the only Chinese phone vendor to witness sales growth in 2019. The company shipped a total of 206 million units in 2018, according to its annual report.
In the third quarter, Huawei shipped 41.5 million units, up 64.6% year-on-year, while Vivo, OPPO and Xiaomi saw 18.9%, 21.7% and 30.5% declines in shipments, respectively, according to research firm IDC.
Huawei’s results come at a time when pressure from the US has resulted in a significant decline in sales outside of China, with the company aiming to strengthen domestic demand to plug the gap. While the firm did not provide a breakdown of shipments at home and abroad, Huawei reported that sales of its Mate Series and P Series phones increased by 50% year-on-year.
Out of Huawei’s 240 million shipments, 6.9 million were 5G phones.
Huawei has been fighting hard to stand firm on its feet as the US placed the company on an entity list in May, which banned Huawei from using services from Google and other US-based firms, without permission from the government.
To mitigate the impacts of losing access to Google’s Android system, Huawei unveiled its own operating system, Harmony OS, in August at a company developer conference. The operating system is still under development, but the company holds it out as a potential replacement for Android if relations between America and Huawei continue downward.
