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Honor unveils US$10 billion investment to drive AI upgrade in smartphones, tablets

Honor unveils US$10 billion investment to drive AI upgrade in smartphones, tablets

Yahoo03-03-2025
Honor's newly appointed CEO pledged to invest US$10 billion over the next five years to drive the artificial intelligence (AI) transformation of the Chinese smartphone maker, as it seeks to integrate the technology across the company's devices.
The "Alpha" investment plan would support Honor's new strategy to evolve from a smartphone maker into an ecosystem company focused on AI devices, CEO James Li Jian announced on Sunday in Barcelona ahead of the annual MWC mobile trade show.
The initiative would begin with the launch of an AI smartphone designed to change the way users interact with their handsets, eventually expanding into an ecosystem of other devices, including personal computers, tablets and wearable devices, Li said.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
Li, who took over from long-time leader George Zhao Ming in January, urged industry partners to share their AI capabilities to create a platform for multiple AI-powered devices.
Former Huawei executive James Li Jian was appoint CEO of Honor earlier this year. Photo: Handout alt=Former Huawei executive James Li Jian was appoint CEO of Honor earlier this year. Photo: Handout>
"This includes the industry becoming truly open, enabling seamless collaboration across different operating systems, and building a value-sharing AI device ecosystem," he said.
The announcement comes as the Shenzhen-based smartphone maker seeks a new direction following a management reshuffle. The new leadership is grappling with fierce competition in the smartphone market, which is expected to intensify as manufacturers race to upgrade their devices with new AI features.
Last week, Honor said it integrated Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek's R1 model into its Yoyo virtual assistant and search engine for smartphones and laptops.
In China, Honor has been collaborating with tech giants including Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings and ByteDance to provide AI capabilities on its smartphones. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Internationally, Honor partners with Google to incorporate Gemini AI models into its devices.
Honor is doubling down on AI after integrating DeepSeek's R1 model into its smartphone virtual assistant. Photo: Reuters alt=Honor is doubling down on AI after integrating DeepSeek's R1 model into its smartphone virtual assistant. Photo: Reuters>
Honor, which Huawei Technologies sold to a consortium of buyers in 2020 following US sanctions, has been facing increasing competition in its home market, where its share has declined.
The brand's China smartphone shipments fell 14.9 per cent year on year in the fourth quarter last year, the largest drop among the top five vendors, according to research firm IDC. It ranked fifth with a 13.7 per cent share, down from 16.8 per cent a year earlier and trailing Apple, Vivo, Huawei and Xiaomi.
Despite the challenges, Honor has been gaining ground in some overseas markets. Its shipments in the Middle East surged 67 per cent last year, reaching 3.2 million units, according to research firm Canalys.
The company also surpassed Samsung Electronics to become the leading foldable handset maker in western Europe in the second quarter of last year, according to Counterpoint Research.
Honor announced plans earlier this month to launch more than 30 products in Indonesia in 2025 as part of its ongoing international expansion.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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So, whenever we break this low volatility spread, that's going to be top of mind for me, and it's probably going to take you, uh, it's going to be an indication of where the next part of the rally or the decline goes. What has been the big driver of the markets outside of stocks? It has been the dollar over the last 24 hours or so, and this was really interesting because I was watching that press conference, it wasn't really a press conference. President Trump was walking around the Fed building with Chair Powell, and there's a little bit of drama there, but the dollar was heading higher after that. And that's just based on some of the headlines that came out of the meeting that Trump is not going to replace Powell, at least for the time being. And so we saw this, it kind of melted up overnight, and the net result is over the last two days it was up about 33 basis points. Doesn't seem like a lot, but in currency terms, it's not nothing. And I'm not ascribing all of the downside in commodities and crypto to it. And let me just put the futures board on there, but I think it was, uh, it was definitely a factor. And so here's our commodities board, more red than green, looks like softs leading the way down, OJ and also coffee down the most, but also silver, palladium, and then sugar. And then looking at crypto, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but Bitcoin kind of slid down below some support. Let me put the year to date on this so I can chart this for you. Here we go. So we did have a little bit of a range here, a break of the range, but in the big picture, you're to date, just barely looks like a blip on your screen there. We keep hearing, Jared, of a skinny bull, a skinny bull with low breath. What do we mean by that? Well, let's take a look at the tech super boom and, or think about it. And here's where I want to call out that Jeffrey Hirsch clip that we have prepared, sat down with us on Stocks and Translation. He's, of course, the editor of the Stock Traders Almanac, so he's very much into seasonality, but separately, he also tracks some of these super cycles, and these are multi-year cycles, sometimes multi-decadal cycles that we see in some different markets, especially tech-driven. Let's take a listen. This is all part of our longer-term outlook of what we call the super boom, um, which is based upon, uh, you know, inflation and in the end of more like peace time, and also, uh, technology. Culturally, what I call a culturally enabling paradigm shifting technology. This is something that Yale discovered back in the '70s where we see these moves after these postwar periods of 500% or more. Um, we came out with this in 2010, this forecast for Dow 38,820 when it was about 10,000. 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