After crunching the Q2 2020 numbers in India, the US, China, and Europe, one analytics company is finally putting all the data together to reach a surprising conclusion. According to Canalys estimates, this was the first three-month period in no less than nine years dominated by a different smartphone vendor than Samsung or Apple.

Incredibly enough, that didn’t stop Huawei from shipping nearly 56 million handsets worldwide during 2020’s second quarter. And while that represented a 5 percent drop from the same number recorded between April and June 2019, Samsung registered a far steeper decline to close the April – June 2020 timeframe with only 53.7 million global smartphone shipments.

We’re talking a 30 percent year-on-year drop in Galaxy sales around the world, which came after a 17 percent year-on-year decline in Q1, obliterating what seemed like a pretty comfortable advantage over silver and bronze medalists Huawei and Apple last year. 

Paradoxically, the coronavirus pandemic helped Huawei pull off the first quarterly global win in its history, as China’s huge smartphone market rebounded much more quickly than India, Europe, and the US after a disastrous beginning of the year. But Huawei’s increasing reliance on its homeland, which now accounts for 72 percent of its total smartphone shipments, suggests the company’s industry dominance will be short-lived.

Curiously enough, the newest Canalys report focuses entirely on the competition between Huawei and Samsung, failing to rank the world’s third, fourth, and fifth smartphone vendors of Q2 2020 or detail the market’s overall shipment figures.