Huawei didn’t need American customers to become a smartphone giant
On October 16th, Huawei announced its latest smartphone, the Mate 10, alongside a Porsche Design-ed version of the same device. In previous years, the phone might have been seen as little more than a me-too clone of Samsung’s Galaxy Note. But these days, Huawei believes that its hardware is more than enough to stand up against the smartphone world’s “big two.” Its status as a major player may not be entrenched, yet, but between flashy product launches and an ever-growing presence on the world stage, it feels almost inevitable.
Huawei’s rise began in 1987 when the Chinese company was founded as a niche importer of telephone switches from Hong Kong. Since then, it has learned to develop its own telecoms and networking equipment, becoming the biggest infrastructure firm in the world. In 2016, it raked in profits of $5.3 billion and its handset business, which started in 2008, is now the third-biggest in the world. From the clunky U8100 in 2010, Huawei now has a plethora of Android smartphones tailored to a wide variety of niches.
(It’s worth noting that there is one small caveat: typically sales figures look at BKK Electronics’ various divisions as separate businesses. BKK, Huawei’s local rival, owns Vivo, Oppo and OnePlus, and would probably put Huawei into fourth place if all those divisions were treated as one.)
Huawei’s one-two punch of networking technology and handsets has made it a welcome friend of many carriers, especially in Europe. The company’s device strategy mirrored the early days of HTC and ZTE, producing white-label devices for networks to badge as they saw fit. But while ZTE has languished at the bottom and and HTC attempted to push its brand into the elite, Huawei stayed the course, flooding the market with handsets of all stripes.
One facet of Huawei’s success is its verticality; it has good relationships with many global carriers, producing reliable and low-cost devices that work well with its own infrastructure. Another is that the company rose to prominence towards the latter period of the smartphone boom. It took advantage of the advances (and risks) made by other companies to learn what not to do.
In 2013, the company’s Ascend P6 was launched as a statement of intent for the Chinese company looking to break into the mainstream. The device cribbed plenty of hardware and software flourishes from both Apple and Sony, and retailed for €449 ($531). It was a cheap phone that felt anything but, and while there were obvious compromises, people took it seriously. Our own review said “The takeaway message here is that Huawei means business. With the build quality and core-functionality nuts cracked, most other niggles should be relatively easy to improve.”
The Ascend P7 remedied many of the flaws of its immediate predecessor, doubling down on its iPhone-design on a budget ethos. It wasn’t going to blow anyone away, not compared to the flagships of the day, but it did what it needed to do well. In the UK, Huawei still uses phones based on the P7, as well as the G6, as the basis for the low-end devices sold by British carrier EE.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/19/huawei-smartphone-giant-challenges-us-mate-10/
