Chinese electronics firm Huawei Technologies has set itself the ambitious target to challenge global market leaders after unveiling the Huawei Mate 9.

Huawei unveiled the Mate 9 smartphone on Thursday and announced its plan to be the world's second-largest maker of smartphones by market share within two to four years.

At an event in Munich, Germany, Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei's consumer business group, unveiled the Mate 9, which is designed to compete with top-of-the-line smartphones from Apple and Samsung.

It has been a bad time for large screen smartphones and slightly more for the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Samsung Electronics continues to struggle with adverse publicity resulting from the high-profile recall of its flagship Galaxy Note 7 smartphone.

Standing in front of a visual comparing how much the new Mate 9 gets heated while charging compared with a Samsung handset, Yu humorously declared that there would be "no explosions!" when charging the new smartphone. This caused the crowd gathered at a hotel in Munich to burst out laughing, Reuters reported.

Huawei is currently the third-biggest smartphone maker after Apple Inc and Korea's Samsung.

"When we announced four years ago that we wanted to sell phones, people told us we were crazy.  When we said we wanted to sell 100 million phones, they told us we were crazy," Yu said.