Huawei taking aim at local smartphone market

May 27, 2013 | 16:18

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The proposed jump of Chinese group Huawei into Vietnam’s smartphone market is expected to diminish the size of the market pie.

Huawei regional director Thomas Liu said the group was set to sell 400,000 smartphones in Vietnam this year.

Huawei envisaged bringing to Vietnamese consumers its latest hero product in Huawei’s Ascend series of smartphones, the Huawei Ascend D2 which runs on Android 4.1. The Chinese group may step into Vietnam’s smartphone market through official distribution channels and open shops in Vietnam before setting up maintenance centres across the country.

At present, Huawei is the largest telecom equipment supplier in the Vietnamese market and reportedly provides almost entire telecom terminal equipment to Vietnamese network operators.

At Huawei, handset trading section only makes up a small proportion, currently generating less than 25 per cent of the group’s total sales revenue.

Albeit a fresh comer in handset field, from 2012’s fourth quarter, Huawei became global third largest smartphone manufacturer, only behind Apple and Samsung.

The Vietnamese market, with forecast 20 million smartphone users by 2015, is considered a lucrative pie to many global ICT players.

Recent report by GfK - one of the world’s largest research companies - shows that Samsung took the lead in Vietnam’s smartphone market with a 43.18 per cent share based on January 2013’s sales revenue and Nokia came second with 19.75 per cent.

Market research firm International Data Corporation figures show that the Vietnamese market witnessed visibility of 70 handset brands in 2012, however only 40 per cent of them were in huge supply holding over 90 per cent of Vietnam’s handset market share.

By By Huu Tuan

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