China’s Honor is staging India return, almost two years after abandoning ship and leaving the world’s second largest smartphone market amid stifling competition and dwindling marketing budget. Its second coming is a bit different, though. Products and services of the former Huawei spin-off brand will be sold in India, once again, under the brand name of “HonorTech”, a joint venture said to be 100 percent fully led by Indian leadership and banking on the sales and distribution expertise of Noida-based PSAV Global.
At the helm of its leadership team is former Realme chief executive officer Madhav Sheth, who will be CEO of HonorTech. Sheth had started teasing Honor’s comeback to India on social media since the last few days, teasing the impending launch of a new smartphone without revealing granular details about hardware. A press release sent out to the media today sheds more light on how things will pan out, but again, it’s thick on nationalist vigour and paper thin on actual technicalities.
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“We at HonorTech, are leveraging our experience and expertise to catalyse transformative change, utilising latent talent, technical knowledge, R&D, and global supply chain. Our transformative endeavour seeks to harness and tap into untapped potential and skilled workforce, aiming to establish India as a global excellence hub,” Sheth said in a prepared statement, adding that “By combining innovation, local empowerment, and self-reliance into HonorTech, we’ve created a brand that stands as a testament to the potential within every Indian. Through our collaboration, we offer India a global product and a strong brand that has cutting edge technology, and a self-reliant ecosystem.”
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A Reuters interview with him is a bit more insightful where the top-level executive has revealed HonorTech’s highly ambitious goals of capturing 5 percent share of India’s smartphone market by sales volumes in 2024 with a revenue target of 100 billion rupees (USD 1.20 billion). In line with the government’s Make in India initiative, Sheth expects all future Honor phones sold in the country to be “eventually” manufactured locally.
The press release calls it a first-of-its-kind joint venture, one that would allow HonorTech to select its product, partners, manufacturing, services and distribution networks for the Indian market and hints at bringing an ecosystem instead of just relying on smartphones to make a selling. The wording is crucial. Chinese businesses have been under great scrutiny by the Narendra Modi-led government off-late. Mobile apps with links to China have been banned and major tech companies from Xiaomi to Oppo are being investigated upon for alleged tax evasion. Strategising and positioning itself as an Indian brand might help ward off any future uncertainties and with the right mix of products, HonorTech might just be able to jumpstart a slowing smartphone market. Whatever be the case, we will know soon enough.
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