Huawei doesn’t have much presence in the U.S. smartphone market even though it is the fifth largest vendor in the world. Last year it sold 75 million smartphones globally but only a small percentage of those sales came from the U.S. This is something that Huawei wants to change. To establish its foothold in this market Huawei has confirmed that it is going to launch the Honor brand in the U.S. later this year.
The Honor brand was first introduced by Huawei in December 2013. Honor smartphones have not been openly sold in the U.S. but that will change in the near future. Huawei devices chief marketing officer Shao Yang tells the Wall Street Journal that contract phones will gradually become more popular in this market which is what will greatly help the company increase its foothold here.
Yang also said that its important for them to “reach the customer directly.” It may not be able to take on Apple and Samsung at this, both have seemingly never-ending marketing budget, so Huawei will be focusing more on digital advertising as opposed to spending precious dollars on conventional media.
Huawei’s U.S. devices business president Xu Zhiqiang believes that even though the U.S. market has all of these different competitors its not sustainable for all of them to be here. “A lot of them will disappear,” he says, “but we will be here.”
The company is only saying that Honor devices will be launched at some point in 2015, an exact timeframe hasn’t been provided.
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