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Huawei sells Honor to the Chinese government

Dominik Bärlocher
18.11.2020
Translation: machine translated

Honor exits the economic war with the USA. The Huawei subsidiary is sold to a newly founded consortium in which the Chinese government is also involved.

Huawei has sold its subsidiary brand Honor to the one the USA fears: The Chinese state, reports the pro-government Chinese newspaper Global Times.

In this way, Huawei wants to prevent Honor from also suffering under the pressure of US sanctions against the company and thus also the profit margin for stakeholders. The CEO of the new company will be Zhao Ming, who is already CEO of the Honor brand. But Huawei will no longer own any shares in Honor.

The government gains a foothold

The buyers of the Huawei subsidiary are a consortium of 30 Chinese companies. The group is led by Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co, which was founded by Shenzhen Smart City Technology Development Group Co, a company established by the state. Rule of thumb: If a Chinese company has the city name in its name, then the government has shares somewhere and represents its interests.

The other members, with or without "Shenzhen" in their name, are all already well-known names in the Honours supply chain.

The consortium statement
The consortium statement

The full-size image.

In a statement, the consortium noted that replacing Huawei was the "only way" to ensure the brand's survival.

Emui back with Google?

An important sentence in the statement: "The change of ownership does not affect Honour's development". This is exciting, as Honor's phones have essentially been Huawei smartphones to date. Just a few months later, with a slightly worse screen and much cheaper. In other words: a Kirin system-on-a-chip (SoC) is installed and the software runs Android with Huawei's Emui on top of it.

So this is to be retained?

No details are known, but one possible speculation is that Huawei is selling the SoCs and software usage rights to Honor. This would then be a clean trade relationship that, at first glance, avoids the sanctions imposed by the USA. This would even make it possible for the new Honor company to do business with the USA and for Google to return to the devices.

How Donald Trump, President of the Unitedsident of the United States of America, will react to the sale is not yet known
How Donald Trump, President of the Unitedsident of the United States of America, will react to the sale is not yet known
Source: Gage Skidmore

Meanwhile, the USA is likely to be keeping a watchful eye on the new company. It is still unclear whether another executive order will be issued by US President Donald Trump. An executive order is a document that is legally an order personally written and signed by the President. In the case of an executive order, the President is not obliged to publish the source of the information on which he based his order.

Honor not only manufactures smartphones. Its portfolio also includes activity trackers, smartwatches and laptops. <p

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