With more and more Huawei products being launched in India, it was an obvious concern for us to raise if Huawei will ever compete with sub-brand Honor at some point. While the two companies follow different price segment in the market, we saw a little overlap between the two with Huawei’s mid-budget Nova 3i earlier this year.
The Huawei Nova 3i, which was the cheaper variant of premium Nova 3, was launched in India in July at a price tag of Rs 20,999. The same price bracket where Honor launched its gaming smartphone Honor Play. Both smartphones offered premium configurations, and were touted as the gaming smartphone.
Speaking to BGR India, Huawei’s Senior Marketing Manager, Wally Yang said, “From very beginning we have had very different approach about product and the company strategy, there could be a grey area in mid.”
Along with the Mate 20 Pro launch in India, we expected Huawei to bring the other two cheaper variants of the smartphone – Mate 20 and Mate 20 X, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Not just that, Huawei does not have any plan to launch Mate 20 or Mate 20 X in India, at least for now. The company doesn’t want to eat into Honor’s market and wants to keep its focus on ‘mid-or-high’ budget segment.
“We have different product portfolio, product strategy and also channel strategy. Especially in India we are aiming more in mid-or-high to high-end segment, so you’ll find that the price of our product portfolio of Honor and Huawei isn’t similar,” Yang added.
The Chinese company believes Huawei products are known for their quality and the price difference between the two portfolio is because the value is different. Yang said that Huawei’s product strategy clearly very different, and with Mate 20 Pro, the company wants people of India to experience the best product first.
Watch Video: Huawei Mate 20 Pro India First Look
Having said that, Huawei isn’t giving up on its mid-premium Nova series for India. It intends to bring follow up successor of Nova 3 and Nova 3i after their global launches.
“Nova series is one of our important series in India market, so continuous series model launch in India you can expect,” Yang told in an interview on Monday.
