Huawei’s Matebook devices were unveiled a couple of weeks ago and today they started selling in China, Huawei’s homeland. Huawei is more known for its telecom equipment and smartphones, rather than laptops and tablets, but they’re making some serious progress there.
Wan Biao, COO of Huawei Consumer Business Group hinted that the company is focused on making laptops sell well. This is no coincidence, as Huawei has invested a lot in design and manufacturing. It seems to have paid off, as the Chinese firm seems happy with the response from customers. Sales of Huawei laptops and tablets have grown 70% in the first quarter compared to the previous year.
This goes against the downward trend of the global laptop and PC business. Of course we don’t have exact numbers from Huawei, but we expected some growth, to be honest. Globally, the shipments of laptops and tablets dropped 6.2% in 2016 to 269 million units, but there’s a slight tendency of resurgence, as new formats come to life and Qualcomm starts offering its Snapdragon chipsets to laptop makers.
Huawei has 3 new MateBook models, the Matebook X, MateBook D and MateBook E. The first of them is a 13 inch fanless laptop priced starting at $1027, while the MateBook is a 2 in 1 unit priced from $734. MateBook D is a 15.6 inch laptop starting at a similar a sum. With the huge profits from the smartphone biz, Huawei is set up for success in this area over the next year.
