BEIJING— Two Chinese telecommunication equipment makers, both based in Shenzhen, saw their sales of mobile phones take off in the fourth quarter of 2011.

ZTE Corp sold 56.9 million handsets in 2011, making it the world's fifth largest mobile phone vendor, while Huawei Technologies Co Ltd sold 40.7 million devices and moved into eighth place worldwide, according to analysts Gartner Inc.

In a report sent to China Daily on Thursday, Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, said ZTE and Huawei were the fastest-growing vendors in the fourth quarter of 2011, behind only Apple Inc. "These vendors (ZTE and Huawei) expanded their market reach and kept on improving the user experience of their Android devices," she said.

The two Shenzhen firms had expressed their ambition to explore new business fields, such as mobile phone production, in addition to their traditional telecom hardware business.

ZTE moved into fourth place in the global handset market for the fourth quarter. The firm posted a 71 percent increase in sales of smartphones, the report said. In 2011 as a whole, ZTE sold 56.9 million mobile phones, with a global market share of 3.2 percent. ZTE's market share in 2010 was 1.9 percent.

Huawei moved ahead of LG in the Android marketplace to become one of the top four Android manufacturers worldwide. Huawei has made significant progress in moving to its own-branded devices, and has continued to expand its portfolio into higher tiers as its tries to build more iconic products, the report said.

Worldwide, mobile device sales to end users totaled 1.8 billion in 2011, an 11.1 percent increase from 2010, the report said.