Dubai: Honor has already booked more than 3,500 pre-orders for its mid-range smartphone launch — 8X — at Gitex, a company official said.
Chris Sunbaigong, president of Honor Middle East and Africa, told Gulf News that the pre-booking started from September 25 and the UAE got more than 10,000 units for the launch as the Emirate became the second country to launch the device after China.
Shifting stocks from China does not happen within days as the device is expected to be sold soon, he said.
The 6.5-inch full-view display screen device is powered by octa-core Huawei Kirin 710 chip set with artificial intelligence capabilities, and sports 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage capacity. The dual cameras on the rear (16MP and 2MP) and 16MP selfie on the front also support AI capabilities. It is priced at Dh999.
Sunbaigong said that this device supports three card slots — two SIM cards and up to 400GB microSD card.
“Our aim is to become the third largest vendor in the region by 2020. Only three big players will occupy more than 70 per cent of the market at that time. In the UAE, we can become the third largest by next year from the current fourth position,” he said.
Huawei’s sub-brand is aiming to achieve a threefold increase in smartphone sales in the Middle East to around three million units compared to one million last year.
Sunbaigong said that the company has already achieved twofold increase so far with 200 per cent month on month increase in Egypt and a 130 per cent increase in Saudi Arabia this year.
By the end of 2018, he expects to achieve more than five per cent average market share in the Middle East from the current 3.5 per cent.
“We want to be the trendsetting technology company for the millennials and that is our target audience,” he said.
However, he said that a new trend is emerging and that is gaming, and added that the biggest gaming audience is in Saudi Arabia followed by the UAE.
To cater to the gamers, he said that the GPU turbo technology on the chip set increases the GPU performance by 130 per cent and power efficiency by 100 per cent over its predecessor chip set.
According to the market intelligence company Newzoo’s latest report, mobile gaming revenues will grow more than 25 per cent year on year to reach $70.3 billion this year.
“Out of this, more than half of all game revenues will come from the mobile segment. Smartphones will account for 80 per cent of this, or $56.4 billion, with the remaining 20 per cent coming from tablets. Console gaming is the second-largest segment generating $34.6 billion, while PC games will bring in $32.9 billion,” the report said.
Sunbaigong added that Honor will be launching successors of 7C, 7A and 7S in the first half of next year.
