According to reports by Reuters, Chinese telecom giant Huawei plans a global expansion into computers, it said on Tuesday, posing a fresh challenge to established PC players in a market that has suffered two years of falling sales volumes and pressure on margins.
At a news conference in Berlin, the Shenzhen-based company introduced its first line-up of three personal computer models, including a 15.6-inch screen notebook, a 2-in-1 tablet and notebook hybrid and an ultra slim, metallic 13-inch notebook.
Initially, Huawei plans to target the premium-priced consumer market, competing with Lenovo, HP and Dell, which together sell more than 50 percent of all PCs. To a lesser extent, it will also go up against Apple’s high-end, but shrinking, Mac computer business.
Here are the laptops, specs, and how they’re priced
Huawei’s Matebook X is a fan-less notebook with splash-proof screen and combined fingerprint sign-on and power button, priced between USD$1570 to USD$1900. The 13-Inch laptop weighing 1.05Kg spots a IPS Corning Gorilla glass display with 2160 x 1440 pixels resolution, 256 GB/512 GB SSD and 4GB /8GB RAM, 5449 mAh@7.6 V battery, and a Intel HD Graphics 620 GPU.
The Matebook E 2-in-1 hybrid priced between USD$1116 to USD$1451 packs a 12-Inch
IPS display screen, Intel HD Graphics 615 GPU, 128GB/256GB/512GB SSD and 4GB/8GB LPDDR3 RAM, and 4430 mAh@7.6 V battery.
The Matebook D with 15.6-inch display is priced between USD$893 to USD$1116, and features, an IPS display screen, weighs 1.9Kgs, Intel HD Graphics 620 GPU, 128GB/256GB SSD or 500GB/1TB HDD, and 4GB/8GB/16GB DDR4 RAM, and 3800 mAh@11.4 V battery.
“From Huawei’s perspective, we see opportunities in the PC market’s decline,” Cheng Lei, senior marketing manager for the PC business, said in a phone interview of the cost-savings and design and manufacturing benefits it gets from its smartphone business, according to Reuters.
Huawei’s new PCs all run seventh generation Intel microprocessors, Microsoft Windows 10 software, Standard: Bluetooth v4.1 (compatible with 3.0 and 2.1 + EDR) and in-house developed software to automate data transfers between Huawei smartphones and its new computer models, Lei said.
Sales Market
Huawei said it aimed to offer the new PCs in 12 countries in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East in early June.
