Huawei Technologies Co (華為) took the wraps off a high-end foldable smartphone to try and stake out a place in the fast-expanding category, revealing that revenue and profit barely grew last year.
China’s largest technology company is trying to keep its shrinking mobile gadgets business alive, despite dwindling expectations that Washington would roll back its curbs anytime soon.
On Monday, it introduced the 17,999 yuan (US$2,786) Mate X2 that unfolds into an 8-inch screen powered by Huawei’s own 5G Kirin 9000 chip.
Photo: AP
“We managed marginal growth both in sales and profit,” Ken Hu (胡厚崑), the company’s current rotating chairman, told the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai yesterday. “We’ll work with partners on how to apply Huawei products in their businesses. Through these partnerships, we are not only hoping Huawei can develop a number of solutions from zero, but also duplicating these solutions in scale.”
Huawei has been running phone production at close to minimum capacity to preserve its existing cache of components and prolong the life cycle of its devices, spurring product shortages at retailers across China, people familiar with the matter have said.
The Mate X2 is to go on sale in China tomorrow, priced at 18,999 yuan for a beefier version with 512 gigabytes of storage. It runs a version of Google’s Android tailored for China, which lacks the US company’s core apps and commercial features, but can be updated to Huawei’s own Harmony operating system in April.
“We have prepared enough capacity for Mate X2, the capacity is growing on daily basis,” Richard Yu (余承東), chief executive of Huawei’s consumer electronics unit, said at a launch event in Shanghai on Monday.
Yu said that more of the company’s top-tier smartphones would be powered by its in-house software rather than Android.
Huawei’s smartphone shipments dove 42 percent in the last three months of last year, while its biggest competitors Samsung Electronics Co, Apple Inc and Xiaomi Corp (小米) all gained market share, researcher International Data Corp has said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy