2017 Huawei Analyst Summit Showcases Strong Growth in Global Presence

Commitment to Intelligent Devices and Refined Experiences to Push Huawei Consumer Business Worldwide

[Shenzhen, China, April 12, 2017] The 14th Huawei Analyst Summit was held in Shenzhen today, attracting more than 500 analysts and media from across the globe. At the summit, Huawei’s Consumer Business Group (CBG) updated leading industry observers on its business and brand performance, its ecosystem around consumer cloud services, and showcased device strategies for the smart digital era. Moving forward, Huawei CBG will focus on two technology revolutions: intelligence and interaction. Tapping into these areas, Huawei will drive the development of smart devices to that reshape consumer experiences.

“These two technology revolutions, intelligence and interaction, will drive user experience forward,” said Sao Yang, Vice President of Strategic Marketing at Huawei Consumer Business Group, “AI innovations will lead to an intelligence revolution, which will help meld the digital and physical world in new and unpredictable ways. Human-device interaction is continually evolving and more natural interaction driven by technologies like VR/AR will show us new ways to experience our devices. As AI technology and VR/AR technology mature and develop, they will radically subvert the user experience of existing intelligent devices. Already, Huawei is actively developing 5G, AI, VR/AR and other cutting-edge technologies and is committed to realize the wholesale improvement of intelligent device experience. “

Huawei Continues to Make Breakthroughs in Global High-End Market

Despite 2016 being a down year for the global smartphone market, Huawei bucked the trend and saw significant growth in its smartphone business. According to IDC, global smartphone shipments increased by only 2.3% last year. Huawei continued to swim strongly against the tide, with smartphone shipments up 29% year-on-year to reach 139 million – far higher than the industry average – while sales revenue saw a robust increase of 44%, up to 179.8 billion RMB. In particular, Huawei CBG has made crucial breakthroughs. As compared to 2015, Huawei CBG achieved a 100% growth in sales revenue in 40 countries around the world in 2016.

According a GfK report, as of December 2016, Huawei’s North-East Europe market share surpassed 20%, while in Western Europe it reached nearly 15%. Its market share in has topped 20% in many European countries, including Finland, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic. For the Western Europe and North-east Europe markets, sales revenue and shipments continue to increase by nearly 100% year-on-year and are expected to maintain strong momentum.

Meanwhile, in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, Huawei is posting strong results in high-end markets. For the high-end market of 400USD and above, Huawei is holds 25% market share in Malaysia and exceeds 10% in Thailand, showcasing Huawei’s influence in the high-end smartphone sector within emerging markets. ¹

Huawei is also beating the sluggish sales experienced by the tablet market. Huawei’s tablet business has dramatically increased in both enterprise and consumer spaces, reaching 10 million shipments – an increase of almost 100% - in 2016. Its consumer cloud services grew by over 100% as well.

With the healthy growth of worldwide business, Huawei’s global high-end brand influence is further improved. According to an IPSOS survey, Huawei’s global brand awareness increased from 76% in 2015 to 81% in 2016. It was also listed again in Interbrand Top 100 Global Brands, ranking 72th; while it entered BrandZ’s Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking 50th.

As Huawei’s continues to grow its brand awareness and reputation, its Net Promoter Score (NPS) globally and in key markets continues to rise, according to IPSOS. For main markets like Germany, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Poland, Huawei’s NPS has doubled.

Growing and Reinforcing Huawei’s High-End Global Brand Status

In 2017, Huawei Consumer Business Group will strengthen its global presence and further develop its global high-end brand influence. Huawei will continue to invest in its channels and retail stores, improve brand marketing and services, and focus on over 20 large influential markets in Europe, the US and Asia. Huawei will continue to strive towards breakthroughs in these developed markets, laying the foundation to grow its influence in major markets around the world.

In China, Huawei will reinforce channel coverage in Tier 3 -Tier 5 cities and further improve mobile add-value service and after-sale service experience to provide consumers with a comprehensive and reliable high-end smartphone experience.

In Europe, Huawei will continue to invest in channel and retail store construction, brand marketing and services based on the existing foundation and will focus on middle-to-high-end market growth. It will also look to raise its market position, brand influence and market capacity in Europe to achieve significant growth.

Currently, emerging markets like Asia Pacific and Africa are undergoing a market shift from functional mobile phones to smartphones. The markets are still changing and there is fierce competition to capture opportunities. Huawei will further develop channels and retail ability to build up high-end brand influence in these markets and ensure fast and sustained growth.

Focus on Two Revolutions: Driving User Experience Forward

While strengthening global market presence and building global high-end brand influence, Huawei Consumer Business Group will also team up with top global partners and focus on meaningful digital-era innovations. This will allow Huawei to continuously improve user experience across both basic and advanced functionalities, and to develop innovations for future intelligent products that will drive the next generation of consumer experiences.

To optimize the product experience of basic functionalities, Huawei Consumer Business Group will continue to invest in quality, design, communication, battery life, audio and video, photography, and other areas. Through cloud collaboration, Consumer Cloud Service will increase user loyalty with value-added digital cloud services. At the same time, Huawei will make good use of its technical advantages such as its proprietary operating system EMUI, its in-house chipset capabilities, AI technologies and more, to provide users with market-leading technology experiences.

Looking ahead, Huawei believes that we are entering the “Intelligent Age,” a new era of technological revolution. In the “+Intelligence” era, digitalization is speeding up dramatically, enabling human perception to reach new heights, and humanizing the interaction between people and devices. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) will bring smarter, more efficient ways of interacting with devices. With the help of AI, smartphones truly become Superphones. By 2025, 90% of device users will benefit from the personalized and intelligent services of the Superphone.

The radically improved user experience driven by AI will upend the core competencies of both device hardware and the cloud, which will be pushed more than ever by more demanding tasks. Huawei’s deep insight into chip technologies and cloud services position the company to deliver intelligent experiences for an intelligent age

Already, Huawei has developed comprehensive perception intelligence, cognitive intelligence, and computational intelligence hardware and has built a robust artificial intelligence system that draws upon its strengths in both software-hardware interfaces and device-cloud interfaces.

Huawei has made technological breakthroughs in sensor algorithms, computer vision, search engine technologies, and semantic understanding, and has launched an Intelligent Assistant that can provide intelligent services for users in a number of unique situations. Huawei Honor launched its Honor Magic smartphone prototype in December 2016 which incorporated Huawei’s latest achievements in Artificial Intelligence.

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¹GfK January 2017