China Calling: Huawei’s Media Tour, Kirin 950 and Why We Went

Moving The Smartphone Target Market

It may seem obvious but part of point of trips is to generate dialogue. Huawei is interested in what we have to say about the perception users outside China have of them, as well as our opinion on their latest product trends, and we’re interested in Huawei both internally for how they work, generating ideas/products, but also externally and how they approach different markets, especially moving into North Americas and expanding in Europe.

While Huawei has been on the periphery of most tech media since the launch of the P1 and the P2, and more prominently so with the Mate 7 and the P8, they are still a brand with little recognition outside of technology enthusiasts in the West. Huawei is well known in China, and product launches are well attended with lots of interest, as well as deep discussions with the media, but it is only recently that they have begun to extend invitations to similar outlets in the west. Part of it is to explain their story, their philosophy, and the other part is to explain to journalists such that they can run their own interpretation, providing Huawei smartphone reviews with at least an element of analysis about the company in general at the same time.

A cynic might argue that in order to get a foothold into the US or expand in EMEA, there needs to be a combination of a large targeted marketing campaign as well as a definitive product individualization, such as an Apple device, or a Samsung, though to LG’s Flex or HTC’s characteristic look.  But even then, HTC’s current situation is in a state of flux despite heavy marketing for a number of reasons, meaning that a big push has both potential risk and reward. As part of this trip, we discussed with Huawei on how exactly we perceive the smartphone market, what are the interesting elements of it and how Huawei can open up to us with both information, structure, and sampling.

It was quite telling that during a roundtable discussion, the journalists around the room were asked what sort of products they were interested in. It was almost a unanimous chorus pointing towards the flagship models for two main reasons – firstly, most other companies provide flagship devices, so there is a rolling comparison and knowledge of an adapting market, but the second point was that the flagship devices typically bring in more variance, engineering prowess and showcase the best of the company talent. Both points are certainly true, and I (Ian) personally can’t disagree with their responses.  

The Huawei Mate S - the company's current flagship device

My argument was slightly different, especially if we compare to the industries I regularly write about; from my perspective, I’d prefer to test the popular devices. With a $600 smartphone, everyone has an opinion on the design, the hardware, the benchmark results, or simply fanboyism, but not everyone has $600 to spend. While a lot of users might discuss the virtues online, or debate over small details, the reality is that a good portion will opt for something around the $250-$300 range for their main device or family devices, depending on contract, region, availability and other features. This is similar to when we get $2000 laptops, or $500 motherboards – lots of discussion, but in reality fewer people will buy them and go for the $800 2-in-1s or sub-$160 motherboards.

Andrei brought up a good point regarding this, which relates back to the first point about mainly reviewing flagships – if you test in the $250 range for smartphones, then there are 80 or so devices to choose from and the review either has to be in a vacuum comparing to almost nothing or based on the limited knowledge of what exactly is in the market, as it's impossible to review every alternative that exists out there. It provides an interesting dilemma for companies like Huawei and their competitors, because depending on what the media wants to look at will dictate what products the manufacturers will sample for review and/or how many are distributed. Thankfully Huawei are open on this and are willing to entertain our future device requests. 

This becomes all important for entry into their non-standard regions, if they feel that there needs to be more presence that just a flagship model. Huawei over the years has slowly reduced their smartphone lineup from around 80 new models a year to fewer than 25, even though most of us only ever discussed three or four of those in 2014/2015 (P8/P8 Lite, Mate 7 and Honor 6). Chances are that the metric of devices moving into the west should increase over time, in both flagship and mid-range markets especially.