During the Honor V40 launch conference that took place earlier today (22nd January 2021), the company’s CEO, George Zhao stated that the company still has more than 8,000 employees after separating from Huawei, and it aims at soon launching on mid to high end devices while also evaluating on using HarmonyOS in the future.

According to an ITHome report, the known Chinese budget smartphone maker still retains over 8,000 employees despite being separated from its former parent company, Huawei. Furthermore, more than half of these employees are working in the company’s research and development department. This department includes over five R&D sites, with more than 100 laboratories across the globe and over 3000 service centers, and 43 call centers in more than 82 countries and regions.

Editor’s Pick: Honor V40 5G with 6.72-inch OLED screen, Dimensity 1000+, and 50MP triple cameras launched; specifications and price

George Zhao also added that Honor will be dedicated to maintaining its standard of service experience and that each of its products undergoes more than 400 rigorous tests and arrive with over 20 global certification standards as well. Notably, the senior executive also stated that Honor would be working on launching mid to high end smartphones in the future, to grow its presence in its home country and overseas market, along with an expansion of its IoT portfolio as well.

Interestingly, the company’s CEO also talked about HarmonyOS and its future with its devices. After its separation from Huawei to avoid the US sanctions, the recently launched Honor V40 arrives with Google support and services. Thus, Zhao stated that the company is currently evaluating HarmonyOS, and would make the decision of using the new OS depending on its open source progress.

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Huawei‘s Consumer Business division yesterday held a press conference which was sort of an appraisal of its performance for the first half of the year which just went by and also to unveil its plans for the second half of the year. During the media briefing, Huawei CEO Richard Yu announced sensationally that the company will stop producing low-end, budget smartphones and would instead focus on premium, high-end devices. Top among this transition is the Mate 10 which would be launched later this year with a premium design aimed to take on Apple’s upcoming iPhone 8 launching around the same time.

Huawei posted a record profit of 20.6% growth in shipment over last year’s H1 figures.  The increase in total shipments also resulted in an increase in the revenue posted for H1 2017 which stands at 105.4 billion Yuan. The Chinese tech leader is hoping to ship 140 million to 150 million units in total this year and with the figures already posted, they are well on the way to achieving a figure in that range. Last year, Huawei shipped 139 million units but that didn’t translate into a commensurate profit margin. This is traceable to the fact that a large chunk of the shipments were budget and mid-range models. Richard Yu gave this as the reason for ditching the very low-end market because of the extremely low-profit margin. The Huawei CEO also disclosed that the company’s priority is Europe, China and Japan where the economy is healthy and people are able to buy the premium models.

Read More: Huawei Ships 73 Million Phones In The First Half Of 2017

This announcement raises some questions that we may not get an official answer soon and the most pertinent is the fate of the Honor brand. Huawei’s Honor brand is believed to focus on high-end phones but we could see the Honor brand revamped. Recently, Honor phones with budget specs were sported on TENAA which was seen as unusual. With this latest development, it is possible Honor will now incorporate budget and mid-range models while the Huawei brand focuses on only flagship models. We’ll get a clearer picture as the days roll by.

(source)

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