"In the past, we always think about the operators, but right now I can say that, I will say no to the super low-end customized devices of the operators." Richard Yu, the consumer BG CEO of Huawei, revealed recently in a media interview, in the second half of this year, Huawei will cut over 80% of the total models, leaving less than 10, the main purpose of the downsizing strategy is to catch up with Samsung and Apple.
In the future, the public channel and e-commerce channel will be the main pattern of Huawei devices, which will account to about 80% of the shipments, while that by the operator channel will be compressed to about 20%. However, just 2 years ago, shipments through the operator channels accounted to 80% or even more of the total shipments of Huawei devices.
"Of course the operators are our long-term partners, but we won’t make the devices with that super low prices." Yu said in an example, in order to save costs, some oversea operators even customized mobile phones without a flashlight, which results in barely no market for the products.
In the first half of this year, shipments of Huawei smartphones exceeded 34 million units in the global market, with an increase of 62% compared to the same period of last year. Data from IDC show that, market share of Huawei smartphones in the global market rose to 6.9% in the second quarter of 2014, ranked in the third place in the world. And the gap between Apple, which ranked in the second place, narrowed from 8.7% to 5% compared with the same period of last year.
Yu believes, Huawei is different from Xiaomi, which is more like a "sprinter", while Huawei hopes to stand still and fight steadily like a "long-distance runner", "there may be only less than 4 vendors left in the future in the smartphone market, our goal is to go beyond Samsung and Apple."