After a couple of really great years, most Chinese smartphone manufacturers encountered a little bit of trouble in their attempts to sustain worldwide growth in 2017. Except for Xiaomi, that is, which bounced back formidably from its unexpected 2016 slump. Don’t get us wrong, Huawei, OPPO and Vivo all had their reasons to be proud about last year’s numbers, but they also had cause for concern regarding their future on the global mobile device scene.

The key to the quartet’s success is “deployments and investments in overseas markets”, which will reportedly accelerate across the board by the end of 2018. Of course, certain major regions remain practically impossible to tackle for even the world’s third-largest smartphone vendor, which still expects to be able to beat its own records this year.

Thanks mainly to the impressive-looking P20 family, Huawei could hope to reach as many as 200 million units shipped around the world for the entire year. That would be up substantially from 2017’s tally of 153 mil, putting China’s top mobile industry export on the fast track to ultimately surpassing Apple.

Meanwhile, Xiaomi “has a chance” of selling anywhere between 120 and 150 million smartphones in 2018, which are two very different numbers. But both of them are higher than the company’s total 2017 box-office scores, and emerging markets like India will continue to play a pivotal role in the progress of “China’s Apple.” As for OPPO and Vivo, we don’t have any numbers to report on, but their “new strategies”, similarly targeting emerging markets with devices “featuring high price/performance ratios and AI applications”, should also bear fruit.