Chinese phone company spends $10 billion to transform itself

Honor, the brand spun off from Huawei, wants to transform from a phone maker to an ecosystem company focused on AI devices.

Honor is committed to investing $10 billion over the next five years to drive AI-powered transformation, according to CEO James Li Jian. The company wants to integrate the technology across all of its devices.

The “Alpha” plan will transform Honor from a smartphone maker to an ecosystem company focused on AI devices, according to James Li Jian, CEO of Honor, on March 2 ahead of the 2025 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The initiative will start with the launch of AI smartphones, changing the way users interact with devices, and eventually expand to other product ecosystems, including personal computers, tablets, and wearables.

Li, who was appointed Honor CEO to replace veteran leader George Zhao Ming in January, called on partners to jointly develop a platform for different AI devices.

According to him, this will truly open the industry, allowing cross-operating systems to collaborate and create an AI device ecosystem that shares common values.

Honor is looking for a new direction after a restructuring. The new leadership must deal with fierce competition in the smartphone market that is expected to continue to be tense as brands race to launch AI devices.

Last week, Honor said it had integrated DeepSeek's R1 model into its Yoyo virtual assistant and search engine on smartphones and laptops.

In China, Honor has partnered with Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance to provide AI features on smartphones. In the international market, the company has partnered with Google to bring the Gemini AI model to devices.

Honor smartphone shipments in its home country fell 14.9% in the fourth quarter of 2024 from a year earlier, the steepest decline among the top five manufacturers, according to research firm IDC. The company now ranks fifth with a 13.7% decline, behind Apple, Vivo, Huawei and Xiaomi.

Overseas, however, sales in the Middle East are expected to rise 67% by 2024 to 3.2 million units, according to research firm Canalys.

Data from Counterpoint shows that Honor also surpassed Samsung Electronics to become the best-selling foldable smartphone brand in Europe in the second quarter of 2024.

Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/hang-dien-thoai-trung-quoc-chi-10-ty-usd-de-chuyen-minh-2376767.html