Honor to cement footprint in SA with store to showcase products

Chinese smartphone maker Honor will be cementing its footprint in South Africa with a physical store.

Honor is battling the bigger brands, whose smartphones dominate mobile operator shop floors, despite their innovative technology, which rivals that of other companies like Apple and Samsung.

Lifestyle

Compared to these brands, Honor does not have the lifestyle products like home appliances and innovative ICT infrastructure products and solutions.

Huawei sold Honor on 17 November 2020 for 100 billion yuan. The separation changed the landscape of the Chinese mobile phone market. Three years later, Honor surpassed Huawei with a market share of 16.2% (2023Q4 data), becoming one of the top three in the domestic smartphone market.

ALSO READ: Honor Magic V5 foldable smartphone to land on SA shores soon [VIDEO]

Market share

While Huawei continued to maintain its dominance in the high-end market with the return of Kirin chips and the construction of the Harmony ecosystem, Huawei and Honor have now taken completely different paths.

Honor relies solely on its smartphone consumer business for its bottom line, which can be a huge challenge in a saturated mobile market in South Africa.

Pandas

During a media tour of China, journalists were shown the vast cultural diversities of the country, including the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, a government-funded non-profit breeding and research institute for giant pandas, red pandas and other rare animals.

But, cute, cuddly pandas aside, tech was the focus of the excursion, and The Citizen was invited to tour one of Honor’s factories showcasing the innovation and technology behind their smartphones, like the Magic 400 Pro and the Magic V5, the thinnest foldable smartphone currently on the market.

Smartphones

Honor also debuted its latest flagship phone line-up with the Magic 8 series and while the new devices are only expected to launch in South Africa next year, The Citizen did get hands-on time with the Magic 8 Pro at the company’s Alpha Store in Shenzhen.

Honor boasts more than 27 000 patents for their products, from screen technology to cameras and batteries.

Despite the achievements, Honor wants a bigger market share in the country and a physical store might just be what it needs.

The technology shown to the media showcased a lot of the innovation Honor is involved in. But it has yet to cross shores into global markets to make an impact on overseas consumers.

Honor store

Honor South Africa’s MD Mark Lei said a physical store is “on its way”.

“We are working now and looking for a good location, this is our priority, and it’s on its way.

“We want to show our smartphones, AI capability and everything else. We are going to use this store to show our products,” Mark said.

Lei said any product that is launched in the country will be brought to the store first.

AI

Meanwhile, as more companies rush towards development in AI technology, Honor announced in May that it planned to invest $10 billion over the next five years to become a contender in the artificial intelligence race.

Honor joins a rush towards AI across industries, which has been especially pronounced in China following the debut of DeepSeek’s reasoning chatbot.

With South Africa also joining the AI race, Honor’s could invest in the country’s goal to create another lucrative market that is growing at a rapid pace.

ALSO READ: HONOR 400 and 400 Pro showcase advanced AI capabilities