As smartphone players in India begin to infuse Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities into devices while looking at Cloud for safe and secure deposit of massive data, Chinese telecom giant Huawei will ramp up its efforts towards building devices with these capabilities for the Indian market, a top company executive said.
“AI is the hot technology now. Huawei is making huge investments into this technology. We have the software and we have the chipset. It is important not only for consumer electronics but also for many other things as well. Thousands of engineers are working on this project,” Peter Zhai, President, Huawei India Consumer Business Group, told IANS in an interview at Shenzhen.
“The consumer electronics business constitutes around 27 per cent of Huawei’s overall business. It is a very important part of our business and we will continue to work towards capturing greater market share in India’s consumer electronics business,” Zhai said, adding that the next focus for the technology giant is the Cloud enterprise market.
“India is very important for Huawei. The Indian smartphone market is now the second-largest in the world. It is bigger than the US market. In the next three to five years, it will become closer to China in size. So it will be a very fast-growing market and a very promising market,” Zhai told IANS.
In the third quarter of this year, the Indian smartphone market grew 37 per cent (quarter on quarter) and 18 percent (year on year). The performance of Chinese brands remained strong and contributed to more than half of the total smartphone shipments, according to market research firm Counterpoint Research. Huawei recently surpassed Apple to claim the second position in worldwide smartphone sales after Samsung.
How does Huawei plan to win the Indian market?
“The Chinese have one winning strategy — put yourself in an undefeatable position and then start taking on the rivals. Huawei follows that,” Zhai stressed. “Huawei wants to win the Indian market with technology, word-of-mouth communication and good quality products. With this strategy, we can strengthen the base for long-term success,” Zhai said, hinting that Huawei is looking for long-term gains rather than short-term success.
“In the past 30 years, Huawei has invested 10 percent of its global revenue in R&D. We will continue this strategy which has helped us taste success all these years,” Zhai said. Huawei’s R&D centre in Bengaluru is the company’s second-biggest centre globally. It has contributed significantly to language customisation, software applications, and creating updates for its Emotion User Interface (EMUI).
High-end Phones at competitive price
In another interview, Huawei Global President George Zhao told IANS “We will launch Honor 7X in December at such a price that it will have no competitor in that segment,”. The phone packs a 5.93-inch screen with 18:9 aspect ratio and 1080×2160 pixel resolution encased in a 2.5 D curved glass. The phone runs on Android 7.0 Nougat along with Huawei’s EMUI 5.1.
The Honor 7X is powered by the Kirin 659 chipset which includes eight Cortex A53 cores and is paired alongside the Mali -T830 MP2 GPU. The phone has 4 GB of RAM and internal storage variants ranging from 32 GB to 128 GB with the option of extending the storage via a micro-SD card.