Honor to make India comeback with former Realme senior exec at helm; to soon launch new smartphone

financialexpress.com:

Honor, previously a Huawei spin-off brand, is set to make its India comeback in the coming days. The brand which exited the Indian smartphone space in 2020, roughly around the same time it was sold to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology in the aftermath of US sanctions on parent company Huawei that restricted the sale of hardware components to it by American firms, is re-entering the market under the leadership of Realme co-founder Madhav Sheth who quit in June after a 5-year-long stint at the Oppo offshoot.

Honor’s last proper smartphone launch in India was the Honor 20. It had come in 2019. Launched at a price of under Rs 35,000, the Honor 20 offered high-end specs including a Kirin 980 chipset and 48-megapixel camera, inside a premium chassis. Most Honor phones have followed the same template at different price points even as the brand served as a more affordable option to Huawei. Also, its phones were sold mostly online. The relationship was like a Xiaomi and Redmi or even an Oppo and Realme.

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Until the US crackdown when the then Trump administration came hard on Huawei with allegations of spying in cahoots with the Chinese government. All US-based companies were directed not to do business with Huawei (and by extension with Honor) hitting its business at the most basic end as it was unable to source Qualcomm chips and Google’s mobile services. It did get some reprieve after a green light from ARM so it could use its blueprints to make its own Kirin chips, at least, but as it turned out it wasn’t enough to ensure it remained afloat globally as a viable smartphone player. Honor, too, was part of the struggle but it was eventually sold to a Chinese