The global launch of the Honor 20 in London today (May 21) was supposed to be an informal and normal gesture for Huawei, the world's second-largest smartphone provider after Samsung.
However, the legal roller coaster that preceded it has now made the event something special.
In the past 24 hours, Google has announced that it plans to remove the Chinese company's access to many of its core Android apps and services, including the Google Play Store, Gmail, Search, and Chrome. which was followed a few hours later by the United States. Commerce temporarily lifts the trade ban with Huawei.
A mastodon at the foot of the clay.
Huawei's current spying and collusion allegations with China's central government are at the heart of the problem. Tensions have been mild in the last 12 months, before the Trump administration did this, and if Huawei was developing its own operating system in the event of an Android ban, it is the crackdown on exclusive Google Services that may be the coup de grace.
While the impact of not having access to security updates and operating system enhancements can be mitigated, not having access to AWS will be a disruptive factor for most organizations. Huawei's smartphone owners may not be agnostic (as this surprising fact reveals).
Huawei is known globally for its smartphone brands (both its namesake offering and its distinctive Honor line), but the current charges are likely related to its lesser-known but equally critical business activities. Huawei is the largest provider of computer networking equipment in the world. It's easy to understand how critical your team is to the global mobile phone ecosystem by examining the impact of a total ban on Huawei.
In simple terms, if all the equipment made by Huawei were withdrawn from the consumer and business market, millions of people in the UK would be deprived of 4G and broadband for a long time.
Huawei's consumer branch is, to some extent, a victim of collateral damage. Hundreds of millions of smartphones have been sold by the company and none, to date and to our knowledge, have been caught by surprise, streaming data to Chinese servers. But the damage has already been done and fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) will likely have a lasting impact on Huawei's smartphone market.
(Image: © Shutterstock)
From Huawei to honor.
One may wonder if the time has come for Honor, the challenging brand launched by Huawei a few years ago, to step out of the shadows and fully capture the Huawei consumer.
The two brands evolved side by side, while Huawei favored a successful "divide and conquer" strategy that led it to obliterate the likes of LG, HTC, and Sony Mobile, and, thanks to its formidable marketing clout and excellent location on products. Become the only real alternative to Samsung worldwide. That is until President Trump intervened.
So what could Huawei do? Running Honor, a brand that is not tainted by accusations, as a different society, could be the solution? Or perhaps most importantly, it will be enough. Huawei has never disclosed the numbers separately, but Honor will likely account for less than 10% of the nearly 200 million smartphones sold by the Chinese company in 2018. Honor is growing rapidly, but it is not enough.
Tech divisions or splits are rare: HP split in 2014 between HP Inc., HPE and eBay, which have parted ways with PayPal, have been the two most notable of the last decade.
The problem, however, is that there is no financial push to split the company, as Huawei's smartphones accounted for about half of the company's 2018 revenue and increased by 45 percent. This compares very favorably with the 1.3% decrease in revenues from the company's network division. In other words, smartphones keep the Huawei buoy; Cut it off and the remaining Huawei may leak.
The challengers
A word about the other challengers; Huawei's struggles will benefit other Chinese smartphone brands. Expect Xiaomi, OPPO (and its subsidiary Realplus), Vivo, TCL (owners of Alcatel-TCL, Palm and BlackBerry) and OnePlus to compete for global supremacy as uncertainty clouds the future of Huawei (and Honor) as a brand of smart phones.
Honor 20, what companies need to know
The Honor 20 is more of an iteration on the Honor 10, while the Honor 20 Pro aims to push the visual limits even further in all lighting conditions with one of the highest DXOMarks yet. Better cameras (and more), better hardware, and the latest version of Android.
For businesses, however, that won't mean much without the support of Android and Google's web services. A little note that the device's performance is truly amazing in the dark, not far from non-infrared night vision territory.