Huawei's entry into the auto industry has made a surprising move: not building cars but starting to sell them in an all-round way

Operator Finance Kang Zhao/Wen

On December 23, at Huawei's winter flagship new product launch, Huawei announced that it was the launch of the first smart luxury SUV car, the AITO Q&E M5. This will obviously be huawei's first time selling a car.

This is Huawei's first self-built car, which has many Huawei features, such as its creation of the Hongmeng operating system; for example, this smart car is equipped with HUAWEI DriveONE pure electric drive range extender platform. Anyway, it is different from traditional cars, typical smart Internet cars. Huawei also went to a brand for this purpose, namely AITO, which is a bit like English AUTO (the English of the car), and has the meaning of AI, suspected of being a combination of AI and AUTO, alluding to the fact that this car is a smart car.

This is the first time that Huawei has sold its own car, Huawei announced that since December 23, 180 Huawei stores in 42 cities have successively displayed real cars; since January 20, 2022, 500 Huawei stores in 118 cities will open to make test drives and reservations, and users can make reservations through the AITO official website and my Huawei APP. This is obviously Huawei's own channel, it seems that Huawei wants to move the car to the mobile phone store to sell.

Huawei is the first to put forward the slogan of car building, asking the team to "build cars according to millions of luxury cars". Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei Consumer BG and CEO of Huawei Smart Vehicle Solution BU, said that this time Huawei will build the mobile phone design team and software team together with the car company, and require the team to build the car according to the built-in, design, performance and experience of the Million Luxury car.

Yu Chengdong reiterated the strategy of not building cars. Previously, the cooperation between Huawei and Xilisi, a subsidiary of Xiaokang, has not yet met expectations from the perspective of sales. According to the latest data from the Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the sales volume of the Huawei Smart Choice SF5 in April-November 2021 is only 7,080 units, which is far from Yu Chengdong's goal of selling 300,000 new cars next year.

Obviously, Huawei's cooperation with Xiaokang Group is difficult to succeed, and Xiaokang Group does not have strong capabilities, but it can help Huawei produce cars. Therefore, Huawei decided to sell its own cars, but did not need to build its own cars.

(Editor-in-Charge: Han Li)