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Worldwide phone sales fell 14 percent in the second quarter of 2020. Analyst company Canalys reports every brand except Apple saw a drop.

It was the second quarter in a row to see a drop in sales. Phonemakers shipped a total of 285 million phones during the quarter. This compares with around 350 million phones shipped in the same period a year ago.

Not only did the Covid-19 pandemic hit sales, it closed factories and disrupted supply chains. People were less able to get out and shop for new phones, yet they chose not to order online.

Follow the money

If anything, money that may have been earmarked for phones was spent on computer hardware enabling people to work from home. Other potential buyers hung onto their money as they face financial uncertainty.

Apple was the bright spot. iPhone sales were up 25 percent on the same period last year. It remains the third largest phone maker in terms of unit sales behind Huawei and Samsung. The company’s market share climbed from around 11 percent to roughly 16 percent.

Canalys says the new iPhone SE accounted for around 28 percent of its sales.1 It reports: “Apple is demonstrating skills in new user acquisition. It adapted quickly to the pandemic, doubling down on the digital customer experience as stay-at-home measures drive more customers to online channels.”

The iPhone 11 was Apple’s best seller taking 40 percent of sales.

Last week this blog reported on Huawei overtaking Samsung as the largest phone maker.

Canalys sounds a warning note about future sales. It says consumer purchasing power has stayed stable thanks to government stimulus packages. The market now faces problems as the stimulus money ends and expected job losses mount.

  1. I’d recommend this to anyone wanting an iPhone without financial stress. ↩︎
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Huawei Petal Search

A US ban shut Huawei out of Google Play Services. It hope Petal Search will make that less of a problem.

Huawei sold more phones than any other company last quarter. It overtook Samsung, mainly thanks to strong sales in China.

For Huawei, success in the home market is a bright spot. Things are less positive in the rest of the world.

Last year the US government issued an embargo that stops the company from using Google’s version of Android.

This makes it harder for people who purchase new Huawei phones to find the big name apps. Among the ones that are hard to get are WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Google Maps.

Popular apps missing

Not having the most popular apps is a barrier to selling phones. Ten years ago Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system floundered because the world’s largest software company didn’t include the most popular apps.

It’s technically possible to run a lot of popular Android apps on a Huawei phone.1 To get them users are required to do a lot of the leg work.

Some popular Android apps can work through a browser, in many cases with less functionality.

In practice the workarounds can be tedious and laborious, the kind of dreary repetitive tasks that technology was meant to eliminate.

That may not be a barrier to people reading this blog post, it will be a huge problem for less tech-savvy phone buyers. There’s another problem to consider that we’ll get to in moment.

Easier, not easy

Huawei aims to make the task easier. Its main, long term, strategy is a Huawei-branded App Store. Many apps have made it to the Huawei App Store. But there are millions, Huawei says around three million, more apps out there.

The company is racing to fill the Huawei App Store, but that will take time. It needs to convince developers to offer tweaked versions of their software. Huawei’s base software is Android, which means Android apps don’t need much work to make the cut. Yet, building Huawei specific versions is not going to be a priority for every developer.

Petal Search is Huawei’s interim alternative. It lets users search for non-Google Play versions of Android apps. In many cases these can be downloaded from developer sites or from third party app libraries.

While it works fine on one level, it is far from perfect. For a start, apps stores have conditioned users to expect timely, automatic updates when software is refreshed. Petal Search doesn’t fix that. You could find yourself running insecure versions of apps – as if the Android world wasn’t insecure enough.

And this brings us to the other big problem. App store owners are supposed to vet apps for quality and security flaws. This doesn’t always work as it should, but there is safety going through the big official app stores.

Petal Search risks

Petal Search can leave you wandering through the seedy backstreets. It can be risky.

Huawei doesn’t need to worry about Chinese customers, they don’t use Google Play Services. There are other countries where Google is less important. But for the western world, the company has millions of phones in circulation that will, in the coming years, be up for renewal. If the Huawei app experience disappoints, they won’t be upgrading to a Huawei phone.

And that’s the huge barrier facing Huawei. It doesn’t matter how great the hardware is, nor does it matter if Huawei sharpens its pencil and drops prices to bargain basement levels. Without access to the apps phone buyers want to run, those fancy phones are lifeless slabs of glass, plastic and metal. They will be almost impossible to sell.

  1. Although paid apps and apps requiring subscriptions can be extra tricky. ↩︎
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Huawei Y6P

Huawei’s NZ$3001 Y6P comes with a three lens rear camera and a 5000mAh battery. There is a 6-inch screen and 64GB of storage.

You get a lot of phone for $300. Low cost phones always come with compromises. This one is a potential killer. A US technology ban means Huawei can’t sell Android phones with all the Google trimmings.

If you prefer US surveillance capitalism over a Chinese alternative stop reading now. This is not for you. Look elsewhere.

Google free zone

There are no Google apps. Instead Huawei offers its own app gallery and a new app to help you find apps that run on post-Google Huawei phones. We’ll look at the Petal Search app in a separate post.

A word of warning: there will be popular paid for or subscription Android apps that won’t run on this phone. That said, if you use that kind of software, it’s unlikely you’d be looking for a bargain basement phone.

The phone hardware is promising enough. Huawei says that 5000nAh battery is good for 32 hours of video playback. It will handle 20 hours of web surfing using mobile data. In normal use you should go two or more days between charges.

Charging other phones

Huawei has included hardware that allows you to charge other phones from the Y6P. You’ll need to buy a separate reverse charging adapter to do this.

The adaptor is not available on Huawei’s New Zealand website at the time of writing. Finding one online shouldn’t be a struggle, but it highlights a lack of attention to detail. It’s something you wouldn’t expect Apple to miss.

Almost the entire front of the phone is a 6-inch 720×1600 display. Huawei’s specification sheet says 6.3-inches, but the image doesn’t go to the edge of the display.

Huawei calls its display Dewdrop. That’s a fancy way of saying the camera notch is tiny compared with other phones. It is, but in practice it is no less irritating.

Y6P camera

Phone makers spend a lot of time talking about cameras. This is the main area where the Y6P departs from premium phones. Keep in mind, the Y6P is at least a grand cheaper than today’s top handsets.

There’s a 13 megapixel camera on the back. It comes with a 5MP wide angle camera and a 2MP depth camera for bokeh shots. The front camera is 8MP.

No-one is going to get excited about the phone’s photography. It’s more than adequate, roughly in line with what you might find on a premium phone three or four years ago. This is more than enough for casual photography, but don’t plan to shoot you next movie on the Y6P.

It’s not a fabulous phone. Yet the Y6P is great value. The big problem is that while it looks like and feels like an Android, it isn’t.

Although you can work around the restrictions, you may not want to. There will be readers who enjoy that challenge. You may have better things to do with your time.

  1. If you’re quick you can buy the Huawei Y6P phone for $200. After August 10 the price will be $300. ↩︎

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Huawei phonesReuters reports: Huawei overtakes Samsung as top handset maker thanks to robust China sales

China’s Huawei Technologies snatched the title of biggest smartphone seller from Samsung Electronics in the second quarter, underscoring the resilience of the China market even as global demand for phones plunged amid the pandemic.

Huawei shipped 55.8 million devices in the April-June period, trumping Samsung’s 53.7 million, according to data from research firm Canalys.

There’s not much in it and phone companies can, sometimes do,  manipulate ‘shipping’ data. Numbers for China are notoriously rubbery.

Yet Huawei snatching the phone sales crown from Samsung marks an important turning point. Five years ago at the Huawei P8 phone launch in Singapore, consumer business group CEO Richard Yu told me his goal was to beat Samsung.

Beat Samsung, challenge Apple

Yu also said Huawei plans to challenge Apple. Samsung may have been the best selling phone brand, but Apple is the one that makes all the money and is recognised by its rivals as the leader. That’s another story.

What’s remarkable about Huawei passing Samsung this year is the company can’t sell a thing in the US, one of the largest markets. It is also hamstrung by US sanctions that mean it can’t use new American-made technology from companies like Google or Microsoft. Most important of all, this means Android.

The pandemic could have been another barrier between Huawei and its phone sales ambition. Covid-19 hit China hard early on and disrupted the country’s supply chains.

Huawei made it to the top rank on the back of dominating sales in China, the world’s biggest phone market.

It’s not all good news for Huawei. The company’s phone sales were down five percent when compared with the same period a year ago. Meanwhile Samsung sales fell 30 percent. Huawei’s non-China sales fell by almost as much: 27 percent.

It’s likely normal service will be resumed when markets recover from the pandemic. Samsung can press home its Android advantage. The company has moved closer to Google since the US pushed its main rival away from the search giant.

There’s a possibility the lack of Android and Google services has yet to sink in with Huawei’s non-China customers.

Yet for now, we can let Huawei enjoy reaching its long-held goal.

 

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From my story at the NZ Herald:

LIC chief executive Wayne McNee says; “Genomics helps up predict which bulls will breed better. And it helps us do it more quickly. That means farmers can breed from a bull when he is younger.

“Traditionally we’ve had to wait until a bull has had daughters before we know how good he is. With genomics you can tell from before a bull is born whether he will be good. That means you can start using him as a sire as soon as he is mature. And you can use the first to sire other predictable bulls. This accelerates the rates of genetic gain quite significantly.”

Using genomics takes about three years off the normal bull breeding cycle. McNee says on top of that benefit there is the knowledge the bull’s sons will also be able to start breeding within a year.

Source: Agribusiness report: Genetics is a long game but it can speed up herd improvement? – NZ Herald

New Zealand agribusiness is making huge strides with projects like LIC’s genomics programme. We are starting to see huge payoffs.

This kind of work is essential. LIC recognises that the environmental impact of dairy herds needs to be addressed. It is doing this in a number of ways, developing cows that cause less greenhouse gases is one goal, another is to breed more efficient cows so we can maintain milk output while reducing the total size of the national herd.

As McNee says: “If we are going to have fewer cows, we need to make sure the ones we have are better.”

I’ve never ceased to be fascinated by what is possible with agritech. In some respects the sector is hitting its stride now, in much the same way digital technology hit its stride in the 1980s. Every year  brings significant advances.