Barcelona (AFP).- After losing leadership in smartphones, the Huawei empire strikes back: the Chinese giant, weakened by US sanctions, showed its ambitions in the smartphone market at the world mobile phone congress (MWC) in Barcelona. computers and tablets, pillars of its diversification.
Accustomed to announcements of high-tech phones, the technophile audience at the MWC was able to see Huawei’s launches: a high-end touch all-in-one computer, a hybrid PC/tablet and another tablet/e-book, which are presented as competition, respectively, from Apple’s iMac, Microsoft’s Surface, or Amazon’s Kindle.
Why the change? Faced with the sanctions that have hindered its activities in mobile phones since 2019, the founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, called at the beginning of the year to accelerate the diversification of the group.
“After developing our brand in the mobile phone sector, we saw that we could diversify and bet on different products: tablets, wearable technologies (“wearables”), audio, PCs, laptops and screens”Andreas Zimmer, responsible for Huawei products in Western Europe, explains to AFP.
“There is a gradual evolution of Huawei, from a mobile phone brand to one of electronic consumables,” he adds, specifying that the Chinese giant entered the PC market in 2017.
Diversification
The world’s leading supplier of components for telecommunications networks in the world, Huawei became among the top three producers of smartphones, along with South Korea’s Samsung and the US Apple.
It even reached number one in the world, thanks to Chinese demand and sales in emerging markets.
But US sanctions, which mostly cut it off from global component supply chains, plunged its smartphone division into uncertainty.
Forced to abandon Honor, its entry-level smartphone brand, at the end of 2020, Huawei no longer appeared at the end of 2021 in the list of the five manufacturers with the largest market share.
At the center of the Sino-American conflict, in a context of commercial and technological war, the Chinese giant found itself in the crosshairs of the previous US government of Donald Trump, who accused it of spying for the benefit of Beijing.
In 2019, Washington put the company on the blacklist to prevent it from accessing American technologies, essential for its products.
The Joe Biden administration has maintained these restrictions.
Penalized by this situation, Huawei published last December a turnover that was cut in 2021 by almost a third per year, to 634,000 million yuan (about 97,000 million dollars).
“difficult” success
Because of the sanctions, Huawei smartphones cannot update Google’s Android operating system, prompting the company to develop its own operating system, HarmonyOS, for its new devices.
Can laptops, tablets, and desktops become alternatives to phones? in terms of source of income for Huawei, when the PC and tablet market is estimated at 250,000 million dollars, according to the Canalys cabinet?
“The PC market is based on scale, the only way to survive is to sell large volumes as PC margins are low,” Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, a specialist in the PC market, told AFP. computers.
“It is difficult to differentiate yourself in this market, since half of the market is for companies, which requires global coverage most of the time,” he says.
With 19.8% of the market in the fourth quarter of 2021, the Chinese Lenovo is the world leader in the sector, ahead of the Americans Apple (18.1%) and HP (13.9%), according to Canalys.
“Huawei has to compete with Lenovo in China and that will be difficult, but not impossible. But to really succeed, it must gain ground in the United States and Western Europe. And these markets have been difficult to penetrate, since they must share space with vendors that have really differentiated products”, warns Ranjit Atwal.
Source: Eluniverso
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