Honor launches the first phone since being sold by Huawei

January 22, 2021:The Chinese smartphone brand Honor, formerly owned by Huawei, has launched its first device since being sold off.

Huawei sold Honor in November to a consortium of buyers in China to help the unit survive in the face of U.S. sanctions.

Huawei was on the U.S. export blacklist called the Entity List in 2019, which restricted American firms from selling some components to the Chinese technology giant. This included both semiconductors and software.

Google had cut ties with Huawei due to which the U.S. search giant’s Android mobile operating system could not be installed on the Chinese devices. That affected Huawei’s sales in markets internationally.

Huawei sold Honor to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology last year. Meanwhile, Huawei had said that the sale was made so Honor could “make it through this difficult time.”

Mostly Honor’s sales come from China. Honor shipped 64 million smartphones globally in 2019, according to IDC. In the first nine months of 2020, the company has shipped 42 million units. The overall record of 2020 is unavailable.

Honor’s new smartphone is called the V40. It boasts a 6.72-inch display and comes in three colors, silver, black, and rose gold.

Honor talked up the phone’s graphics processing and touchscreen capabilities, gaming features on the device, and a widespread use of smartphones in China.

The V40 uses a key 5G chip from Taiwan’s MediaTek, a company that became China’s number one smartphone semiconductor supplier in 2020.

Honor’s V40 starts at 3,599 yuan ($556) for the 128GB storage option and 3,999 yuan for the 256GB version. Although it is not confirmed if the phone will be launched internationally, it will be released in China.

“The message Honor wants to convey is they inherited a lot from Huawei, no matter if it’s the chipset capability, photography, and R&D (research and development) all the things they got from Huawei devices, they have it all,” Nicole Peng, a mobile analyst at Canalys said.