Huawei CEO: since the S4 is a 'so-so smartphone' and Apple is 'slipping,' we can be third by 2015
Huawei CEO Richard Yu holding the world's slimmest smartphone the Ascend P6
It is thus becoming very apparent that the company is getting serious about its product offerings, applying the needed attention to detail, and trying to come up with good value-for-money propositions.
More interesting is that Yu is planning to focus on quality and innovation as well, paying meticulous amount to detail, and producing phones better than Apple and Samsung, while selling them for less. We can't say this is a bad recipe for success, if Huawei can pull it off. In an interview Huawei went even further, saying that Apple and Samsung are losing it, and there is a place under the sun for a competitor to offer superior products at a better price:
We want to provide the best, most beautiful, slimmest smartphone – this one [Galaxy S4] is much thicker. We’re not made of plastic. In the high tier, if you have huge money to spend on marketing and branding, like Samsung, then everyone will buy that. We don’t have so much money to do marketing and branding so we have to make our products better.
The best smartphone in the past was from Nokia, then from Apple, then from Samsung. And who is number one? The industry is so dynamic – no matter how successful you are, if you’re currently number one, doesn’t mean tomorrow you’ll be number one. Samsung, they have such huge money – if you invest in marketing and branding then people will always buy no matter how good the products are. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is just a so-so smartphone...
In its latest update, Apple makes the phone extremely simple to use. But if we are just learning from them we can’t catch up, because they are now slipping. We want to go higher than them...
We have a good relationship with Google. We want Android to be more user friendly, so we have made a lot of enhancements. Google is good for an engineer but it’s not good for the consumer. It’s a little bit too complicated.
Things that are NOT allowed: