Apple Inc. (AAPL): After Xiaomi, Is It Huawei Who’ll Challenge The iPhone?

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) may be about to face stiffer competition from yet another Chinese smartphone maker: Huawei.

According to Bloomberg’s Shery Ahn, the Chinese company is planning to step up its game in the high-end smartphone market, a niche Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is particularly embedded in.

“Huawei intends to apparently focus more on high-end devices now. The company says that sales of high-end devices will rise to more than 30% this year, that’s up from 18%. […] They will be shipping more than 100 million units this year and Huawei has been expanding its lineup of mobile devices to better compete with fellow Chinese manufacturers Xiaomi and Lenovo,” Ahn said.

Xiaomi, another Chinese handsets maker, recently launched the Mi Note smartphone and its CEO boldly said that it wants to be the largest smartphone maker in the world.

According to Ahn, Huawei is actually another substantial competitor in the smartphone space as Strategy Analytics said that the firm was actually the fifth largest smartphone maker in the world in terms of shipments in the third quarter of 2014 with 5% market share.

“[…] Now they are boosting their high-end lineup while they are trying to compete with the likes of Samsung, Apple. They’re also trying to sell more overseas. They expect sales coming from that portion to rise to more than 60% from the current 52%,” Ahn said.

Nonetheless, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is not sitting quiet as its rivals up the ante. Ahn said that the American consumer electronics giant is “certainly not falling behind.”

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) just reported its latest quarterly performance. The company made a record $18 billion in profit in the last quarter on $74.6 billion in revenue, the largest bottom line any public company has ever reported in a single quarter.

Carl Icahn’s Icahn Capital Lp owned about 52.76 million Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares by the end of September.