Huawei Consumer Business Group achieves steady growth for the fifth consecutive year and successfully enters the high-end European market
Huawei Consumer Business Group (CBG) revealed its expected 2016 annual performance figures. For 2016, CBG predicts sales revenue of 178 billion RMB, 42% up from a year ago, achieving steady growth for the fifth consecutive year. Smartphone shipments also reached 139 million units with 29% year-on-year growth; according to IDC, the increasing rate of global smartphone shipments was only 0.6% in 2016, which means Huawei is outperforming the overall market.[1]
Richard Yu, Huawei CBG CEO, said, “Despite tough market conditions Huawei CBG is still growing with industry-leading speed. This can be attributed to our consumer and innovation-centric approach, as well as our ongoing commitment to building a premium brand, reinforcing our global channels and ensuring consistent, high-quality service. In 2017, we will strengthen our supply chain, channels, R&D, services and any other areas required to streamline our operations, improve the efficiency of our decision-making and implementation, drive our internationalization strategy and proactively develop future capacity.”
While the global smartphone industry is slowing down and lacks innovation, Huawei CBG builds on its product leadership and leads a new trend of industry innovation by pioneering ground-breaking developments in key technology areas. In 2016, Huawei CBG has focused on developing meaningful innovations and has made breakthroughs in the areas of operating system (EMUI based on Android), dual camera technology, artificial intelligence and more.
Huawei’s cloud service-centered consumer ecosystem is taking shape in China, offering global business opportunities to developers and forming an open and transparent Huawei software ecosystem. Today, Huawei CBG has over 200 million cloud service mobile users and over 22 million registered developers. Partners were sharing over 2.8 billion RMB in revenue in 2016 through Huawei cloud services.
While developing its high-end product portfolio in 2016, Huawei also invested in building its global channels, service infrastructure and brand to ensure high customer satisfaction and positive brand perception.
For pre-sales and after-sales, Huawei built five global service centers that support 105 countries through hotline services. Huawei also has over 460 service stores covering 45 countries around the world. According to IPSOS research figures, Huawei ranks no.1 in customer satisfaction among users in China, Poland, Mexico, Egypt and many other countries.
For channels, Huawei greatly improved its open market channel capacity and the share of open market channels rose to 71% in 2016, 13% up on 2015. Huawei’s global retail network now has over 70,233 stores. Huawei has built long-term stable partnerships with hundreds of distributors and retailers all over the world. Most notably, market channel coverage rose over 50% in Italy, Spain, Poland, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
In addition to increasing product leadership and global high-end brand influence, in 2016 Huawei CBG broke into the European high-end market and gained balanced and steady growth in many markets around the world. Huawei’s overseas smartphone shipments equaled domestic shipments and its mid-high end handset shipments rose to 36%.
In Europe, Huawei CBG has achieved great breakthroughs in the European high-end market thanks to strong sales of P9 and P9 Plus. GFK data showed that currently Huawei holds over 15% market share in 30 countries and over 20% in another 20 countries, half of which are European countries. In north-east Europe and Western Europe, Huawei’s market share exceeded 15% and 10% respectively. Particularly in some northern European countries Huawei holds a dominant market share and in the UK, France, Germany and other key markets, Huawei CBG made significant progress.
In 2017, Huawei CBG will continue to put consumer needs first and will develop a consumer-facing system focused on channels, retail, brand, marketing and services, to strengthen its business base and streamline its operations and customer service. In the meantime, Huawei is committed to making further breakthroughs in innovation that will help consumers have a more intelligent, connected lifestyle. We will continue building on our core competencies to lead the future and become a popular cultural and technical brand for consumers.
