Huawei sells its new high-end smartphone via a messaging app

With plenty of competition among Chinese smartphone manufacturers, new techniques are required to get consumers in the country interested in a particular brand. Xiaomi has found some success with the "Hunger Marketing" technique. With this method, consumers are asked to pre-register their interest in a particular phone, so that Xiaomi can grab the email addresses of hundreds of thousands of potential buyers. Once the handset is hyped sufficiently, a very limited number of phones are sold. Just the other day, 10,000 units of the Xiaomi Redmi Note phablet were sold in one second.

Huawei apparently has its own method for selling its phone that is off the beaten path. According to the Wall Street Journal, Huawei decided on Chinese messaging app WeChat, to be one of the channels it will use to sell the Huawei Honor 6. The high-end device is powered by a home-grown octa-core processor, and sports a 5 inch screen with resolution of 1080 x 1920. A 13MP camera is on back, with a 5MP front-facing snapper ready to take great selfies.

Huawei, which usually sells its handsets in the region through local carriers, is hoping to widen distribution of its devices using the WeChat app. The messaging platform, which is in a partnership with Chinese e-commerce company JD, ran a contest giving away a free Huawei Honor 6 to the person who could correctly guess the price that the handset would be sold at. That figure turned out to be 1999 Yuan ($322 USD). Right now, Huawei has 8% of the Chinese market which puts it in sixth place in the country.

With 400 million users, WeChat is used for texts and voice messages, to share pictures, play games and is even used to hail a taxi. Last year, an online payment system was added to the app, which Huawei wants to exploit. If this is successful, we could see other handset manufacturers try the same thing.


source: WSJ