Honor is turning into a formidable rival to Huawei

Author | Huang Yu

Edit | Zhang Xiaoling

The past three years have been full of challenges for both Huawei and the glory of independence. After the past three years, Huawei's "light boat has crossed ten thousand mountains", and Glory has also reached a key turning point.

Huawei is both a halo and a constraint for Honor, which makes it more difficult for Honor to establish an independent brand. In the past three years, Glory has been breaking the demons in its heart, and it has also worked hard to prove that it can find a path of its own.

In fact, in the past three years, Honor has achieved breakthroughs in its own product research and development, high-end folding screens and overseas markets, and its market share in the third quarter of this year ranked first in the domestic mobile phone market, and it is becoming more and more confident.

The glory of growing happily under the wings of Huawei, after three years of difficult rebirth, from struggling in the line of life and death to reaching the top of the domestic mobile phone market, this independent mobile phone manufacturer that strives to break through in the high-end is worthy of re-examination.

On November 17, on the third anniversary of Honor's independence, Honor CEO Zhao Ming posted a reflection on his personal Weibo, bluntly saying that Honor is not willing to be defined, and his goal is to spell out a global iconic technology brand again.

From being attached to Huawei's sub-brand to becoming Huawei's opponent that cannot be ignored, this is not only Zhao Ming's ambition, but also Ren Zhengfei's expectation.

rebirth

In the past, Honor was a sub-brand built by Huawei, focusing on the younger, low-end mobile phone market. Internally, Honor developed products based on Kirin chips and the HarmonyOS platform, and in 2020, Huawei was forced to sell Honor. After independence, Honor relied on industry SoC solutions to develop products based on the Android system.

This also means that the glory that came out of Huawei's "greenhouse" basically has to start from scratch and rebuild its own platform-based capabilities and systems based on the global industrial chain.

During the period when it first became independent, Honor inevitably experienced the darkest moment, from a brand that once accounted for about 15% of the domestic market share, to a trough of 3%.

Zhao Ming said frankly that if you go back to three years ago, in the Chinese market, the newly independent Glory is the weakest among all the core players of mobile phone brands, otherwise in 2020, no one would say "Glory is finished, it is impossible to get up." ”

In the extremely involuted mobile phone industry, Honor must race against time and be ready to enter the market as soon as possible.

Therefore, Honor and Huawei have taken different technical routes.

Glory is equivalent to picking up Huawei that fell to the ground. Huawei does the underlying R&D (operating system and chips), while Honor chooses to deepen engineering technology and jointly innovate in butterfly wing hinges, Luban titanium hinges, titanium alloy 3D printing processes, etc., which is conducive to Honor creating core technology advantages in a short period of time.

Honor has chosen the consumer-oriented route. Zhao Ming explained: "Honor needs to consider what is the best product and solution that can be provided to consumers at the moment or for a period of time, we can also develop SOC (system on chip), but to achieve a SOC to the industry-leading level, it takes 5-7 years, such a time cycle, how can we better serve consumers?"

After the first year of "survival" and the second year of "accumulation", Honor's product strength has also been significantly improved this year.

Market sales are worth a thousand words. In IDC's ranking of China's smartphone shipments in the third quarter, Honor ranked first in the domestic mobile phone market with a market share of 19.3%.

In overseas markets, although Honor has not yet been able to make it into the top five, it has grown strongly. According to Zhao Ming, Honor has grown by more than 200% in overseas markets this year and has achieved profitable growth within two years.

In the current mobile phone market with stock competition, Honor must make a breakthrough in the high-end phone market if it wants to further increase its market share. Zhao Ming also set a flag and said: "Honor wants to be in the high-end market and can really change the situation of Apple's dominance." ”

The folding screen has become a strategic breakthrough for Honor to hit the high-end. This year is the year when Honor broke out on folding screens, and three folding screens were released in a row within 3 months, from Magic V2 in July to Honor V Purse in September, and then to Magic Vs2 released in October.

After several years of mental training, folding screen mobile phones have actually entered the mainstream consumption stage, and it is expected to help Honor further increase its market share in the high-end market in the future.

"Last year, the year before last, the global folding screen shipments were 3 million units, and this year to the end of August was 3 million units. Zhao Ming expects that the annual shipment will reach nearly 6 million units this year, and the shipment volume may be more than 10 million units next year.

There are no shortcomings in the high-end, and Honor cannot lag behind in the AI large model. According to Zhao Ming, Honor is also about to launch a self-developed 7 billion parameter end-side AI model and a new cloud service.

ambition

Independently going to the market, the story of glory in the past three years makes people feel a lot of emotion.

One of the topics that can never be avoided is Huawei. Huawei's genes are not only valuable assets for Honor, but also bring some constraints, such as the Honor brand that is not independent enough, and Huawei's shadow.

This is the demon of the Glory team. Zhao Ming recalled, "From the first day of Glory's independent business, people kept telling me that it was impossible. It is impossible to get out of the innate definition, it is impossible to go beyond the preset boundaries of the industry, and it is impossible to break the existing cognition of the world. ”

Zhao Ming believes that Honor has been breaking boundaries and challenging established orders or standards in the past. The achievements of the past three years have proved that it has developed without being dependent on Huawei, and has taken a different path.

Although it does not develop chips, Honor focuses on building a lot of underlying capabilities, including thinner folding screens, AI large models, Oasis eye care technology, Qinghai Lake batteries, etc.

The biggest reason why Glory can quickly re-emerge, Zhao Ming believes is the "team". "We can do it all over again, we can do better, and that's the biggest confidence for the team when we went independent three years ago. ”

It is also because of this team that now that the big brother Huawei has returned, Zhao Ming is not afraid.

He said: "The return of Huawei, Huawei's strong Mate 60 to the market, this is very good. What we like the most is to compete with strong players, we come out of that system, who is afraid of whom. ”

Glory also has a greater ambition, which is to create the glory of the world. It does have a lot of room in overseas markets.

2022 is the first year of glory overseas, and 2023 is the first year of Europe. Zhao Ming pointed out that Europe is a highland of glory. Honor wants to build Europe into a "second home market", and to become a high-end brand in Europe, the next step is to build world glory.

At present, with the increasingly fierce competition in the domestic and foreign markets, the future of Honor is still full of opportunities and challenges, in the high-end market, Apple, Samsung and Huawei are still the iron triangle, and it is not easy to break through.

Three years ago, Ren Zhengfei, the head of Huawei, said at the farewell party that Honor would be Huawei's strongest competitor in the world, surpassing Huawei, and even shouting to defeat Huawei. "In the future, we are competitors, you can hold 'foreign guns' and 'foreign cannons', and we will hold the new 'made in Hanyang', the new 'big swords and spears', and it is not certain who will win and who will lose?"

Three years later, Huawei and Honor have become dazzling presences in China's science and technology innovation power map.

Born in Huawei's glory, it has inherited Huawei's values and culture, and also has its own unique product and brand connotation. This is a wolf team that is not afraid of fighting tough battles, everything is possible in the future, perhaps, the next Chinese mobile phone brand that can compete with Samsung and Apple in the global high-end market is glory.

Ren Zhengfei will also look forward to seeing that day.