Huawei is now the 3rd Largest Smartphone Maker, passing Microsoft

As Microsoft’s total share of the world smartphone market drops down to 6.4%, Huawei’s has grown to 7% for the second quarter of 2015 according to market research from the firm Strategy Analytics.

This puts Huawei into third place worldwide for sales of smartphones, behind the giants Samsung and Apple, which own 20.5% and 10.9% of the market respectively for Q2, 2015.

The change in market positions between Huawei and Microsoft has been quite drastic between Q2 2014 and this latest quarter of 2015.

In mid-2014 it was Microsoft which owned 11.8% of the total market in second place with Huawei sitting in third at just 4.8% of sales. Microsoft is not only in a lower tier but also somewhat wounded with a nearly 50% decrease in market share over the last year, while Huawei’s share has grown by 45%.

Microsoft’s phone manufacturing arm comes from the old Nokia division that the company bought in April of 2014. While the market share that Nokia occupied in early 2014 was excellent, the drop since then has been considerable.

In other terms, Microsoft has sold only 27.8 million phones in 2015, in comparison to the more than 50.3 million it sold during the same period last year. Huawei, in contrast, has grown its sales from just over 15 million phones shipped in 2014 to 30.6 million sold by Q2 of this year.

Back when Nokia was its own company it manufactured two thirds of all cell phones sold in the world and its brand strength continued even after other manufacturers had switched over to touch-screen smartphones. Nokia also dominated the Windows phone market at one point as an independent company, with a 90% share of this relatively small Windows phone market.

So with these recent figures Microsoft’s massive drop in phone sales following the company’s acquisition of Nokia looks all the more unfortunate.

Huawei, in contrast, is a major Chinese manufacturer of highly affordable Android smartphones, which has slowly been pushing its way into mainstream North American consumer consciousness with the release of a number of new phone models.

There are even rumors that Huawei will be creating a Nexus device at some point in 2014 –something that would offer a major boost to the company’s image in North America and the U.S market in particular.