Huawei Makes Initial Moves Into Commercial Sector

Chinese technology giant Huawei announced on Wednesday that it will rename its “consumer business” as its “terminal business,” marking an initial entrance into the commercial sector. The renamed terminal business will have two branches: One will provide products targeting the public and the other will focus on governmental and enterprise customers.

Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s terminal business, said that the division will rely on hardware and software to enrich product categories such as business-used notebooks, desktops and monitors, tablets, smart screens and wearable devices, focusing on providing solutions for governments and six major industries such as education, medical care, manufacturing, transportation, finance and energy. At present, Huawei’s terminals have served more than 25,000 governmental and enterprise customers in China, covering 31 provinces.

The product lines of Huawei’s terminal business include MateBook B, MateStation B, display B, pad C, PixLab B, smart screen B and WATCH B.

Huawei professes that its advantage lies in meeting the multi-dimensional management needs of organizations or enterprises for terminal equipment by relying on the customization capability brought about by HarmonyOS. In addition, Huawei provides multi-level data security solutions to ensure the safety and reliability of data transmission.

Yu said that Huawei’s existing products have been widely applied in business fields such as insurance and health care. Based on the data of Huawei’s bracelets, China Merchants Life Insurance has realized differentiated pricing for different groups of consumers and optimized insurance schemes.

Entering the commercial sector is a realistic way out for Huawei’s consumer business. Last year, Huawei’s revenue from its consumer business, which used to be the firm’s main source of income based on blooming smartphone sales, fell 49.6% year-on-year to 243.4 billion yuan ($37.82 billion).

A Huawei insider said that business-used products have slightly lower requirements for chips than smartphones, and Huawei’s current ability to obtain chips is enough to meet existing demand. More importantly, Huawei needs new revenue sources when the road ahead for its smartphone business is still unclear.

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Huawei has long shown signs of entering the commercial sector. Last year, Huawei released products such as business-used notebooks and desktops, and has established a certain influence in governmental and enterprise markets.