How Honor plans to make its comeback into Indian market
Honor sees India as a “huge” market and is working with its local partners on setting up operations to tap into the opportunities in the world’s second largest smartphone market where it is seeking a re-entry, said its CEO George Zhao.
“India is a huge market for everyone. We are very careful about the market.
We are discussing with the Indian partner to work on what kind of portfolio will work for India,” Zhao told ET. “With our partner PSAV, we have confidence that we can further improve our operations in India.”
To re-enter the market currently led by Samsung but dominated by Chinese players such as Vivo, Oppo, Realme and Xiaomi, Honor has inked a distribution deal with PSAV Global, which is its existing distributor of Honor tablets and wearables.
PSAV has formed a joint venture — HTech— with Madhav Sheth, a former India CEO of Realme, to launch Honor smartphones in India.
HTech plans to invest Rs 1,000 crore in India to set up operations for the Honor smartphone brand.
Zhao said the brand is ramping up its operations across regions such as the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Europe and South America by setting up local teams and channels to sell smartphones. Honor’s smartphone sales volume grew 150% last year, he said.
Honor, he said, is a challenger brand in the smartphone market in India, focusing equally on hardware and software innovation.
“We will continue innovating in display, battery tech software and artificial intelligence. Both hardware and software need to work smoothly to give a better experience to users,” he said.
Under pressure due to US sanctions, Chinese telecom firm Huawei sold the Honor smartphone business assets in 2020 to a consortium of buyers in China, with Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology
