It’s been over 1,000 days since Donald Trump (ex-president of the United States) shot Huawei in the heart. The White House launched a missile against the waterline of the Chinese technology company in May 2019. No US company was allowed to work with this company claiming security reasons.
Intel, Qualcomm, and Google have stopped working with the Asian brand. This meant that only the mobile division of the Android ecosystem was blacked out. Jaime Gonzalo (Huawei’s vice president for consumer mobile services in Europe), says that in 2020, we sold fewer phones than in 2019. He adds, “But, revenue increased.”
This blow to one segment of the brand was devastating. In the year of the veto, Huawei was one of three companies with the highest number of mobile phones sold. Huawei needed to reinvent itself and shift its focus. He adds that while other companies might be more cautious due to the drop in sales, Huawei still spends 16% of its profits on R&D. “The situation is complicated and difficult.”
Jaime Gonzalo
Vice President, Huawei Consumer Mobile Services Europe
According to Omdia data, Huawei has stopped selling four of five smartphones it sold in 2020 in 2021, which is 80% more. This means that global mobile phone sales have dropped by 80%. Gonzalo adds, “We have discovered that the smartphone has lost its crown as the king of Christmas.”
Comparing to data from the previous year, smartphone sales in the Old Continent dropped by 1% in 2021. The vice president of European consumer mobile services at Huawei, says that this “reaffirms” the notion that smartphones are important in a certain way.
Gonzalo says that anyone can use a Huawei smartphone. He says that it takes a little bit of learning to use a Huawei phone. He points out that Gmail can be used, even though many people don’t know how to do it.
He says that in the midst of creating the technological future, the metaverse is growing, “we realized that there is an user appetite with Internet of Things (IoT).” James Gonzalo. He adds that “this need isn’t covered”.
Huawei’s solution, “that no one in the industry has done yet”, is based upon a “wireless” and “barrier-free” technology ecosystem. All devices can be interconnected in a new world. This new project, which was presented at the Mobile World Congress 2022, has been dubbed Super Device by the Asian company. It allows multiple devices to interact with each other, such as sharing a screen, a keyboard and mouse, and transferring files. Gonzalo says, “We don’t regard them as independent machines. They are an entire organ.” He adds, “This should aim to be the IoT.”
The seventeenth edition, which took place in 2022, of the Mobile World Congress had connectivity as its central axis. Gonzalo says that there are many smartphone companies, and most of them are creating a standard Android experience. He defends his claim that “we did not copy it” and instead proposed an alternative.
Huawei’s latest proposal is focused on connecting smartphones, tablets, and monitors to each other. It also benefits from the ease of pairing accessories. He says that while we have been working on this for some time, it was accelerated by the Google divorce. He adds, “It’s still not cold outside Google.”
The new world is not connected to the metaverse, says Huawei’s vice-president of consumer mobile services Europe. He points out that “we didn’t create the metaverse.”