According to a CNBC interview with Francisco Jeronimo, research director for European mobile devices at IDC, "Huawei is today the biggest challenger to Apple and Samsung. Indeed they are growing very fast. They will probably overtake Apple in the smartphone business, either this year or next year.

In the second quarter of this year, Huawei held a 11.3 percent market share, shipping 38.5 million units, IDC data show. Apple meanwhile shipped 41 million iPhones and had a 12 percent market share in the same period.

Jeronimo puts a lot of emphasis and hope on Huawei's new smartphone AI chip that he believes could be a game changer.

Huawei is holding a live product event in Germany today at 5 a.m. PST, 8 a.m. EST.

The CNBC report did realistically point out that Huawei trails the likes of Samsung and Apple in terms of both profits and revenues in the smartphone market. Apple and Samsung also collectively account for around 94 percent of profits made in the smartphone market in 2016, according to data from market research firm Strategy Analytics. Q1 2017 smartphone profit stats showed that Apple took 83.4% of profits.

So in the end, Huawei's ability to sell volumes of smartphones with many of them being priced under $400 may impress IDC's top researcher, but it's meaningless in the bigger picture of profits.

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