Company planning to focus on Chinese market

Jun 17, 2019 06:46 GMT  ·  By

Huawei expects international phone sales to go down by as much as 60 percent, according to estimates shared with Bloomberg by people with knowledge of the matter, as the company struggles to deal with the ban announced by US President Donald Trump in mid-May.

Huawei, which originally said it would be fully capable of dealing with the ban, is now considering several options to reduce the impact of the restrictions, the aforementioned source continues.

These options include even pulling the Honor 20, a new smartphone projected to go live in Europe on June 21. If the device doesn’t sell well, which the company thinks is very likely to happen, it could be retired completely from all markets.

Focus on China

The early interest in this smartphone appears to suggest that sales are likely to be very low, with a couple of carriers in France not even planning to sell it.

Overall, Huawei sales in foreign markets could decline between 40 million to 60 million units this year, and the Chinese tech giant plans to counter this drop by investing more aggressive in its domestic market.

Huawei wants to secure as much as 50 percent of the entire phone market in China this year, but given the fierce competition in the country, this is without a doubt an ambitious goal. Previously, Huawei said it wanted to overtake Samsung as the world’s number one phone manufacturer by the end of 2020.

According to the US ban, Huawei is no longer allowed to work with American companies, and this means it can’t use their software and hardware for the creation of new devices.

Huawei can’t license Android and Windows for new models, so the company is currently developing an in-house operating system that could go live on Chinese models as soon as this fall.