Digitimes says that Samsung and Huawei both reportedly have informed downstream suppliers to reduce their inventories of parts and components prepared for the third quarter as the two vendors have lowered their shipment targets for the quarter by 10-20 percent.

Samsung hand been telling the world that it would flog 28-30 million units of its Galaxy S7 for the third quarter, while Huawei hoped that it would sell 14-15 million Huawei P9 devices during the same period. It claimed that Huawei has also lowered its smartphone shipment target for 2016 to 120 million units from 140 million.

The reduced shipment target means that Huawei now expects its smartphone shipments to grow only 13 per cent on year in 2016 compared to a 30 per cent growth it estimated previously, said the sources. Huawei shipped 108 million smartphones in 2015.

Huawei tells us that the figures are not right. It shipped 28.3 million smartphones, a 64 percent increase on last year and more than 2.6 million P9 and P9 Plus, its flagship dual-camera phones, within six weeks of their release in April.This means that compared to Huawei’s earlier P8 lineup, shipments of the P9 and P9 Plus increased 130 percent globally. It says that this was  driven by strong growth in many countries including the U.K., France, Finland, Poland and Thailand.

"Huawei is also diversifying into new device categories, as we will start sales of the award-winning MateBook, our first 2-in-1 PC, in the United States and Canada next month, after launching in China. Since its debut earlier this year, the MateBook has won 20 awards around the world, exciting consumers with its innovative design," it said.

So it looks like Digitimes got Huawei wrong at least.

The figures relate only to these two companies. It is not clear how badly we can expect Apple to do this year. Its iPhone 7 has already been written off because it offers no new technology. Meanwhile its Chinese market is expected to contract more.