GUANGZHOU, China – Honor, Huawei’s former Chinese smartphone brand, has launched their first device since its sale.
Huawei Honor, their budget smartphone brand, sold in November to a consortium of buyers in China, as a way to help the unit survive against U.S. sanctions.
In 2019, Huawei was blacklisted by the U.S. export list known as the Entity List which banned American companies from selling certain components to the Chinese technology giant. This included both semiconductors and software.
Google had to cut ties with Huawei, meaning the US search giant Android mobile operating system could not be installed on Chinese company devices. That severely damaged Huawei’s sales in international markets.
Last year, Huawei Honor sold to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology, a consortium of 30 manufacturers and vendors. At the time, Huawei said the sale was made so Honor could “make it through this difficult time.”
“Circulating the Honor team should help him get the parts he needs, although that could still take several months and is not at all certain, especially with the geopolitical tension in the air, “said Bryan Ma, vice president of equipment research at IDC.
“Nonetheless, the move is helping to keep the team engaged with suppliers in the hope that they can continue product development.”
The majority of Honor’s sales come from China. In 2019, Honor shipped 64 million smartphones worldwide, according to IDC. In the first nine months of 2020, the company has shipped 42 million units. Complete data for 2020 is not yet available.
The V40
The new Honor smartphone is called the V40. It has a 6.72-inch display and comes in three colors: silver, gold and rose gold.
Honor spoke of the graphics processing and touchscreen capabilities of the phone, features that add to the game on the device, a popular use of smartphones in China.
It has the ability to connect to next generation 5G mobile networks, a key requirement in China which is the world’s largest market for 5G phones.
The V40 uses a core 5G chip from MediaTek in Taiwan, a company that became a leading smartphone semiconductor provider in 2020.
Honor’s V40 starts at 3,599 yuan ($ 556) for the 128GB storage option and 3,999 Yuan for the 256GB version. It will be released in China but it is unclear if it will be launched internationally.
“The message they (Honor) want to convey is that they have gained a lot from Huawei, whether all they got was chipset capability, photography, and R&D (research and development) from Huawei devices, they have it all, “said Nicole Peng, a mobile analyst at Canalys.
“They don’t want to show that they miss Huawei’s R&D capability. They want to show that they still have it and they have a great R&D team and that’s something people were asking when it split. them, can they sustain that kind of innovation. ”