Oppo dislodges Huawei to become the best-selling smartphone brand in China for the first time ever

The world’s largest smartphone market, unsurprisingly, is China. It’s a fair chunk of global market share so the company with the largest slice of the market in that country has an advantage around the world. For January 2021 that company is Oppo, which outsold competitor Huawei for the first time ever.

That’s the word according to market research firm Counterpoint Research, which detailed why Huawei’s sales declined on its home turf. Oppo, for the month of January, secured 21% of the country’s market. Vivo closely followed, with 20% of China’s market under their control, while Huawei, Vivo and Xiaomi secured 16% of the remaining share apiece. The remaining 12% is where everyone else in the world sits — you know, Samsung, Apple, all the other ‘big’ names.

Oppo site day

Oppo increased its sales by 26% year-on-year and by some 33% over the previous month (December 2020) — but that increase was mostly at the expense of Huawei. Formerly the dominant smartphone brand in the region, Counterpoint lays declining figures at the door of several factors. One is Huawei’s decision to focus more on premium devices, which don’t sell in as large volumes as to the entry-level and mid-range stuff.

Huawei selling off its Honor sub-brand is also partly responsible for the company’s drop on the leaderboards. Those handsets are no longer part of Huawei’s sales totals. A lack of access to supplies, thanks to Donald Trump’s Entity List antics, have also had an impact on Huawei’s ability to deliver the number of handsets it previously fielded.

Oppo’s also credited with doing some stellar work of its own — the company’s Reno series of handsets and its affordable A-series devices garnered some credit for the brand’s increase in that region. And, by extension, in the rest of the world. China’s a very large market, after all.