Australian Financial Review: Huawei to hell: company stays but consumers are leaving

WhistleOut Publisher Joe Hanlon, talks to John Davidson from the Financial Review about the falls in Australian interest in Huawei devices following government bans for both its consumer and infrastructure business:

According to WhistleOut's "share of voice" metric, which measures the percentage of customers who take an interest in Huawei phones compared with other brands, Australians suddenly lost interest in Huawei phones around the time the company was added to the US entity list.

Huawei's share of voice had been climbing steadily before that, in line with the company's rise to become the No. 2 phone maker in the world, ahead of Apple but behind Samsung, but then it fell sharply in the second quarter of last year, and has been in steady decline since, said Joe Hanlon, publisher at WhistleOut.

"The decision of the US to block Google has had a clear impact on the popularity of Huawei smartphones," Mr Hanlon said. Huawei's popularity peaked at 5.5 per cent share of voice in the second quarter last year, but has since fallen to just 1 per cent, according to WhistleOut's figures, compiled from search and traffic data on the site.

"Australians were just starting to pay attention to these products and now they have all but disappeared from our consideration set.

"The shame of it is that Huawei deserved the attention it had garnered. It had earned it with a string of excellent devices and looked set to do even better going forward. But the sad fact is that without Google, Huawei phones are dead on arrival pretty much everywhere outside of China."