Chinese Chase
Huawei, which beat LG Electronics to rise to the third place last year, exhibited not just smartphones and tablet PCs at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014, but also smart watches. It unveiled these products there to penetrate the market that has been led by a handful of non-Chinese companies such as Samsung Electronics and Sony.
Additionally, it unveiled the Ascend G6 smartphone, the MediaPad M1 8.0 and MediaPad X1 7.0 tablet PCs, and the TalkBand smart watch. The 4.5 inch phone weighing 140g is a follow-up model of the Ascend P6, which is very popular with Southeast Asian and Chinese customers. The watch comes with functions like sleep check and pace counting, not to mention voice calls, and is planned to be equipped with a biometric function in the near future.
ZTE displayed the FireFox phone named OpenC and the Grand S2 LTE, a six inch Android handset. The former is considered to be the starting point of the company’s multi-OS strategy.
Lenovo, which took over Motorola from Google last month, exhibited the new K7t smartphone Kingdom and new tablet PC products in its integrated booth. Lenovo was the fifth-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world until last year, with a global market share of 4.6%. Given that Motorola’s share is 1.4%, it is now the third largest.
The competition in the global mobile market is expected to heat up even more due to those Chinese players’ business expansion. Huawei, ZTE, and Lenovo are planning to launch large-scale marketing campaigns in North America and Europe as well as China and Southeast Asia this year.