Newsletter
Huawei was founded in the year 1988 in Shenzhen, China, but it didn’t manufacture its first smartphone until 2003, and ever since then the company has slowly grown into becoming one of the largest and most important smartphone manufacturers in the world. As it is known, Huawei is currently more focused and prominent in Asian markets, as they are where the company was established originally before it became the multinational tech giant it is now. Today, Chinese-based smartphone manufacturers are starting to see the huge advantages that having a greater popularity in Western markets would have; and due to this, many Chinese OEMs have begun adventuring into the Western market, which is still somewhat skeptical towards Asian smartphones. This issue is still the greatest barrier for Chinese OEMs that want to expand in other territories outside Asia; including Huawei, which if able to completely overcome the huge obstacle set by the overall Western market, could easily become the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world.
Currently, Huawei is positioned as the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, but it seems that it is not enough for the company, as further expanding into Western markets is a huge opportunity. In order to fulfill this expansion vision, Huawei must first change the bad reputation that Chinese smartphones have in the United States and other Western countries. A significant part of the population in the United States, still believes that Chinese-based smartphone manufacturers don’t have the ability to produce high-quality devices that match the ones made directly in the nation’s own territory. Fortunately, Huawei has acknowledged this major issue and is taking the necessary steps to correct its highly damaged image.
Over the past few years, you might have heard or read about several Chinese smartphones that are amazingly affordable and boast some monster specs, such as the highly praised Huawei P8. Well, the company is now planning to produce more of these type of high quality devices to ship into the United States and other Western markets to prove that even if a smartphone is made in China, you won’t be getting a cheap knock-off device, and instead you’ll get an accessible smartphone on par with all the current flagships from other OEMs. Huawei also has another trick that ensures that the devices it produces are of top quality, and that is the employment of human manufacturers over automated machines to completely take over their assembly lines. Of course having an automated assembly line guarantees that every single device will be essentially done the same, leaving almost no room for errors, and could be produced in greater mass; but by replacing humans in factories, Huawei strongly believes that you lose something essential in the process. The company still has several human workers that monitor the process and make sure every important part of a device is correctly installed and gives the device one last look before it is shipped.
Huawei’s Mobile Design Vice President, Joonsuh Kim mentioned that in the near future, the company’s upcoming devices will not fail to impress all of the different smartphone markets in the world, as “the P9 will be very surprising”. If this is indeed true, the upcoming Huawei P9 will have no problem selling in Western markets, which in addition to the rumored Huawei Nexus, will improve the overall impression that the world has of Huawei and other Chinese OEMs.