China's Huawei challenges Apple and Samsung as it reports huge boost in sales
China's Huawei's smartphone shipments rose by 63% YoY, due to a growth of its mid-to-high-end range of devices, as it looks set to challenge Apple and Samsung and shed its image as a cheap Chinese manufacturer. The total number of smartphones shipped by Huawei for 3Q2015 was 27.4 million units.  The Chinese company's smartphone shipments to Europe grew by 98% and to the Middle East and Africa by 70%, YoY.  Furthermore, Huawei knocked Xiaomi off the top spot for 3Q2015, says research firm Canalys.  This news comes despite an overall slowdown in the global smartphone market, a drop in sales for Sony, HTC and Samsung, and S&P predicting LG Electronics will see weakened profitability.  Additionally, earlier this month Huawei signed a deal with Syria to design a "national strategy for information and communication technology", including the construction of a broadband network for Internet service. China is betting that when the civil war is over, Syria will be a good place to do business. With Huawei's present deal with Iran to install equipment in the country to track people's locations, US intelligence officials suspect that the company is giving the Chinese government access to the equipment it installs, thereby acting as an arm of the Chinese surveillance apparatus.

While the smartphone market largely remains a two-horse race between rivals Apple and Samsung, Chinese handset maker Huawei is placing increasing pressure on the industry giants after experiencing strong growth in China and Europe in 2015.

Third-quarter deliveries climbed 81 percent and 98 percent in China and Europe respectively from a year ago. About a third of the quarterly shipments were mid- to high-end models, Huawei said, up from 25 percent a year earlier.

Huawei cemented its position as the third-largest smartphone vendor, a rank that previously belonged to Chinese rival Xiaomi, after its third-quarter smartphone shipments rose 63% year-over-year to 27.4 million handsets, according to Reuters.

"It's hard to find a solid contender to Huawei for the top three position (after Samsung and Apple) in the short term," said Nicole Peng, Asia Pacific director at research firm Canalys. "That's impressive growth."

Huawei is projected to ship more than 100 million smartphones in 2015, around 33% more than 2014, outpacing growth forecast for major rivals including Apple, Xiaomi and Lenovo. The Shenzhen-based handset maker also doubled its smartphone revenue in the first half of 2015 in China, a key smartphone market alongside the United States.

Nevertheless, Huawei remains a distant third behind Apple and Samsung, largely because its market penetration remains low in the U.S., where its devices were once labeled a security risk in a U.S. Congressional report. Huawei's smartphone market share was worth $7 billion in the second quarter, according to Canalys.