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Samsung lost its smartphone-shipping crown to Huawei in Q2

For the last nine years, Samsung has been the biggest smartphone manufacturer in terms of devices shipped. In the second quarter of 2020, however, it lost its crown to Chinese company Huawei.

This is according to research firm Canalys’s latest figures. “Huawei shipped 55.8 million devices, down 5% year on year. But second-placed Samsung shipped 53.7 million smartphones, a 30% fall against Q2 2019,” it claimed.

This is based on sharp growth in Huawei’s homeland: China accounted for 72% of its shipments last quarter, up from 64% a year ago due to some of the restrictions (particularly in the US) on its international business. Canalys said that Covid-19 had played a role.

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Deezer gets promotional push on Huawei’s AppGallery

Chinese technology firm Huawei is a controversial company in the west, but it is still hugely successful globally, having shipped 240m smartphones in 2019 alone.

A trade ban with the US has meant the company can’t preload Google’s Android apps on those handsets however, so Huawei has developed its own ‘AppGallery’ app store as an alternative to the Google Play store.

Now streaming service Deezer is getting a promotional push on AppGallery by being designated a ‘Hero Status’ app. Deezer is also offering Huawei’s customers a three-month free trial of its premium tier in Europe, Russia and Turkey.

Note: Huawei also has its own streaming music service, Huawei Music, and in April claimed that it had more than 160 million monthly active users, as it launched in 16 new countries in Europe.

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Global smartphone shipments down as Huawei overtakes Apple

Apple’s quarterly financial results are always the trigger for a new round of figures on the global smartphone market, and such was the case yesterday.

Research firms IDC and Strategy Analytics agree on the key trend: smartphone shipments are down slightly year-on-year. IDC claimed a fall of 1.8% to 342m smartphone units shipped in the second quarter of 2018, while Strategy Analytics estimated a 2.8% drop to 350.4m units.

The details are slightly different, then, but both companies also agreed on another aspect of the market: that Chinese firm Huawei has overtaken Apple to become the second-biggest smartphone vendor behind Samsung.

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Huawei to launch a music-streaming service in South Africa

Chinese technology company Huawei may be best known in the west for its hardware, but it’s also gearing up to launch a music-streaming service in South Africa.

Huawei Music will launch this year, with a catalogue initially made up of 80% South African music, with plans to add international content later.

According to local news site Tech Central, at the launch event Huawei said that in China, Huawei Music has 32 million daily active users playing 3.6bn songs a month.