As expected, Huawei as also present at MWC 2015 held in Barcelona, Spain. The Chinese giant announced its first ever smartwatch at the event and it is one of the best smartwatches that we have seen till date.
Huawei CEO, Yu Chengdong was present at the event and in an interview, he said that the smartphone industry will reshuffle in the next three to five years. Only three major smartphone manufacturers will survive in the market by that time. Naturally, he considers Huawei to make it to the top three, however, the rest of companies, even some from the top will soon be forgotten.
Chengdong added that Huawei makes sure it stays ahead of the competitors by investing significantly in R&D. In fact, according to him, only few companies in the industry can match Huawei’s R&D team. Although Huawei is considered in the class of Xiaomi, OnePlus ones and Lenovo, he believes that the company is good enough to compete with giants such as Apple and other silicon valley tech companies.
He says that their true competitors are not these Chinese companies but giants from the western world. In fact, he says that most Chinese smartphone makers will soon perish giving way for Huawei to become the market leader.
IDC reports show that Huawei is indeed growing rapidly. Last year, the company generated sales of over $74 million, growing by more than 54% as compared to 2013. The market share of the company rose from 4.8% in 2013 to 5.7% last year.
Although the company failed to get to the $80 million sales target, Chengdong adds that it was due to the increased focus on high end devices. The company now aims to sell about 90 million to 100 million smartphones this year.
Given the timing of the launch, the Huawei watch will directly compete with Apple Watch. However, he says that his company’s watch is much better than Apple.
Huawei is yet to expand aggressively in developed markets like US, and there have been several allegations about national security threat by using Huawei’s equipments. However, he dismisses all these allegations by saying that one of the main reasons Hauwei decided to adopt Google’s Android platform for its phones and tablets is because of the vast variety of third party apps and features on the Android OS. Moreover, a third party OS will definitely help the company fight such allegations.
When talking about Xiaomi, he said that most people refer to the company’s marketing and sales when it comes to measuring success, and Xiaomi has managed to work on them. However, in the long run, technological innovation will drive the growth of the company and hence, the companies that look quite successful right now may not survive in the long run.
Huawei still cannot be regarded as one of the top smartphone makers, but it shows promise and we will have to wait and watch how the company evolves in the next few years as a consumer products manufacturer.
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