Even though Huawei has managed to achieve second highest smartphone sales globally for Q1 2019, it looks like its goal to hold off Apple for the rest of the year won’t be achievable after all. In the wake of recent US government trade war with China and the executive order by President Trump, the Chinese tech giant is one of the biggest losers.
The company wanted to beat the market leader Samsung in sales by the end of next year but has now stopped or reduced its production to rethink its goals, as per media reports.
Huawei, on other hands, has rejected the claims. “our global production levels are normal with no adjustments in either direction”, said Huawei while communicating with ProPakistani.
Effect on Foxconn
Huawei is not the only one being affected by the current situation. The production giant Foxconn has a lot to lose as well. According to South China Morning Post Foxconn has stopped a number of production lines for Huawei. Huawei has reduced its orders because it is uncertain about the fate of the company in the future.
This is devastating for Foxconn since it hired thousands of employees to meet Huawei’s production needs.
New Goals?
Huawei came into the market with the thoughts of ruling the smartphone industry. Where it was working hard to reach its goal, it had managed to one-up Apple from its second place and was working towards taking the throne from Samsung, but the current situation has forced the executives to rethink their goals and devise a new strategy for the company.
Zhao Ming, Huawei Honor’s president, said in a press conference, “As the new situation has emerged, it is too early to say whether we are able to achieve the goal”.
He also said they were rethinking their goal of taking Samsung’s first place by 2020 since the cut off will greatly affect Huawei and Honor’s growth spurt.
Currently, Huawei is on a 90-day reprieve in the US before the ban goes into effect. One of the biggest difficulties it will face is building an operating system from scratch since Google will no longer grant the Android license to Huawei.
Android operating system is open source, so there is no license required to use, modify, or redistribute it. Google only licenses GApps and sync features like OTA.
Huawei only needs to create a wrapper OS on top of Android and their own platform tools for contacts and photo sync and cloud storage etc. to replace google apps.
Even then, users will still be able to side load Google Apps on their own.