Huawei Slowly Closing On Apple and Samsung

How do you or have heard people pronouncing this word, Huawei, (and please don’t laugh). The funniest pronunciation which tops the ranks that I heard is Huawei being pronounced as “WHO ARE WE.” Personally, I think Huawei is pronounced as WAH-WAY. WHO ARE WE OR WAH-WAY? What’s your take?

Ok, done with the pronunciation discussion now going into the main core of the article. Dumping their previous business model of flooding the planet with cheap, unbranded cellphones, China’s Huawei has risen to become a globally recognizable brand and a serious contender for Apple and Samsung. Advancing rapidly into new markets worldwide, Huawei is now the world’s number three smartphone brand, with an 8.3 percent market share. Europe, in particular, has been receptive of Huawei, where the company is growing at an unprecedented clip on the back of better products and a new brand image.

Just to give you a brief background of Huawei’s rise from humble beginnings in Shenzhen in 1987. Huawei started out as a producer of phone switches. Growing up with the city’s nascent electronics industry, Huawei would become the global leader in telecommunications networks by 2012 — despite a ban by the US government and its knee-jerk ramifications.

Huawei now stands to make the most waves with its prime consumer product: smartphones. The results of my research show that in 2015 Huawei Technologies Co. full-year 2015 revenue rose 35.3% from a year earlier to 390 billion yuan ($60.1 billion), aided by strong sales growth for smartphones. In 2016 the company experienced a torrid growth in sales and revenue. Sales jumped 40% to 246 billion yuan (about $39 billion) in just its first half of the year, a healthy increase given worldwide smartphone sales had flatlined compared to last year. Huawei led market share for the full quarter that ended in June 2016. Huawei’s trajectory is looking even steeper, as it is selling more than a 10 million unit year-on-year increase, while Samsung stay flat and Apple actually going into decline.

I am amongst those people who are very particular about their phone’s brand. I also enjoy trying out new brands. I have used a Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, HTC, Microsoft, Blackberry and now Huawei phone. I liked using the Blackberry even more, but since its demise, I now have a new brand. My first Huawei phone that I bought was a Huawei Ascend P8 and now I am currently using the latest Huawei Ascend P9 that is strongly equipped with massive memory storage, a strong processor, and a new version of the superb Leica camera.

From my experience in the sales department at Econet Wireless selling Econet’s products and services, i.e., Econet Premiums, smartphones, and so forth. Huawei was one phone I would recommend and sell like today’s newspaper. It never disappointed me when I needed it to the rise to the occasion, as far as increasing my sales, generating revenue for the company and getting more referrals from satisfied customers was concerned. As a sales person I understood the environment and the people I was selling these products to, so during this economic meltdown in my country huawei for me was that product that resonated with their expectations and these expectations were, i.e., Affordability, Battery life, Performance, Storage size, Service centre availability, User friendly, Customer support and phone’s durability. And for those reading this article, I have just revealed one of my secrets in earning high sales that at one point I hit a record of a whopping $24,570US in just ten working days: – You must understand the environment and people that you are selling your product to.

Huawei is also aiming to be the world’s biggest spender in research and development, Richard Yu, the director and CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group said, and has poured resources into its own chips, machine learning and artificial intelligence, to conserve power and keep the Android platform from slowing down over time. The company has also dedicated $9.2 billion dollars to research and development with the hopes of making a more polished product that can convince customers to switch.

After the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, the Note 7 will be the device everyone remembers, and not for the right reasons. Samsung’s next big thing turned out to be a big disaster, and what was almost the Android phone everyone could heartily recommend, became the Android phone one needed to sleep, walk or drive around with a fire extinguisher close by. Huawei swooped in to save the day with the Mate 9.

The Huawei Mate 9 is the newest and most powerful Mate series phone equipped with the latest Kirin 960 (Now you won’t slow down, thanks to the new Kirin 960 processor and intelligent Machine Learning algorithm. This ground-breaking interplay between hardware and software means your Huawei Mate 9 is born fast and stays fast, 4000mAh battery ( State-of-the-art Huawei Supercharge technology safely charges the device for a full day’s power in 20 minutes) and the 2nd generation of Leica Dual Camera.

The world’s No. 3 smartphone maker by volume hopes to become No. 2 within one or two years, Richard Yu said — that means knocking down Apple or Samsung. Of course, there are big shoes to fill. Both Apple and Samsung are expected to put enormous effort into their next generation handsets. For Apple, the 10th anniversary of the iPhone could be a chance to revive sluggish sales growth; for Samsung, it’s a chance to recover from its recall of the Galaxy Note 7.

Apple is about to face its biggest challenge yet: Huawei, recently launched a high-end phone in the U.S market, the Huawei Mate 9. Now, the company will be infiltrating Apple’s biggest market, American smartphones. Yu took aim at Apple several times during his speech, noting the cheaper Mate 9 is thinner than the iPhone 7, has a longer battery life and faster charging. Huawei was also the first phone to sport dual cameras, like the iPhone 7’s, Yu said. The Mate 9 also has help from Apple’s rivals, with integration of Google’s virtual reality platform, DayDream, and Amazon’s artificially intelligent assistant, Alexa.

“‘Genius’ is no longer in the domain of a chosen few,” the Mate 9’s promotional video said, showing a picture of a lightbulb. Apple, of course, is known for its Genius Bar and recently introduced an ad featuring bursting lightbulbs. Still, executives from Google and Amazon both told the audience there is even more to come in partnership with Huawei, including a Google augmented reality feature and more Alexa features.

To conclude: “We never hide our ambition,” Richard Yu said at a speech at technology trade show CES in Las Vegas when launching the Huawei Mate 9, adding: “We have a vision to make the world’s best smartphone.”