Chinese vendor Huawei hit its target of shipping 100 million smartphones this year, the company confirmed in a blog post.

He Gang, president of Huawei’s device product line, said on his Weibo account: “Shipments of Huawei smartphones exceeded 100 million units this year by December 18.”

Huawei has been the top performing handset vendor this year, with smartphone shipments expanding 63 per cent to 27.4 million units in Q3 after seeing strong growth for its more expensive products. Annual growth in the overall market slowed to 10 per cent last quarter.

The company is the world’s third largest smartphone maker, with a 7.5 per cent global market share in Q3, up from 5 per cent a year ago, according to Strategy Analytics. It has expanded rapidly across Asia, Europe and the US, putting pressure on rivals such as Lenovo-Motorola and Xiaomi. Between March and September 2015, Huawei was the top smartphone vendor in China.

Last week it said sales for its Consumer Business Group – comprised of mobile phones, mobile broadband devices and “home devices” – in Western Europe topped $2 billion in 2015, with a 45 per cent year-on-year increase.

Huawei also is preparing to take its Honor brand to the US market, with reports that the company could make an announcement as soon as next month’s CES 2016. With Honor, it has a suitably western-sounding brand to crack a market where the company’s networks division has suffered due to its Chinese origin.

Last year it shipped a total of 138 million handsets, including 75 million smartphones. The company said in a statement that over the past five years smartphone shipments have grown more than 30 times, from three million in 2010 to 100 million units in 2015.