Huawei gained ground in Europe and expanded its lead back home. The estimated rise in market share comes as a slowdown in the world’s biggest smartphone market, China, eased. Huawei has got ahead of rivals by selling more feature-packed phones, while Apple charged more for similar handsets.

IHS Markit analyst Gerrit Schneemann said that Huawei had cleaned Apple’s clock by shifting to more value-added models, and by launching new flagship smartphones with the latest features.

Huawei’s P20 Pro is the first flagship smartphone model to be equipped with triple cameras, beating competitors to market.

Huawei on Tuesday said overall it had raked in 15 percent higher revenue in the first six months of 2018, steady at levels seen a year ago.

Huawei grabbed more than 15 percent of the global smartphone market over April-June, overtaking Apple’s roughly 12 percent and just behind Samsung’s 20 percent share.

Data from Canalys estimated industrywide smartphone shipments in China topped 100 million in the second quarter from 91 million in the first, shows Huawei grew its share of the home market by six percentage points on the year to a record 27 percent.

The outfit would have done even better had the US government not intervened to shut it out of the US under somewhat dubious spying claims.

Huawei has denied it facilitates spying and has said it is a private company not under Chinese government control and not subject to Chinese security laws overseas.

The outfit said all its businesses, including smartphones, telecom equipment and IT infrastructure services, did well in the first six months of the year.

Revenue rose to $47.97 billion, while operating margin rose to 14 percent, from 11 percent a year ago.

Huawei’s consumer division, which houses its smartphones business, accounted for roughly a third of its total revenue last year. It got half its revenue from its carrier business.