Huawei Consumer Business Group expects robust 2016 performance

Huawei Consumer Business Group (CBG) revealed its expected 2016 annual performance figures. For 2016, CBG predicts sales revenue of 178 billion RMB, 42 percent up from a year ago, achieving steady growth for the fifth consecutive year. Smartphone shipments also reached 139 million units with 29 percent year-on-year growth; according to IDC, the increasing rate of global smartphone shipments was only 0.6 percent in 2016, which means Huawei is outperforming the overall market.
Huawei CBG CEO Richard Yu said, “Despite tough market conditions Huawei CBG is still growing at an industry-leading pace. This can be attributed to our consumer-centric approach that focuses on creating meaningful innovation, as well as our ongoing commitment to building a premium brand and reinforcing our global channels and service capabilities. In 2017, we will strengthen our supply chain, channels, research and development (R&D), services and several other areas required to help us streamline our operations, improve the efficiency of our decision-making and implementation, drive our internationalization strategy and proactively develop future capacity.”
While the global smartphone industry is slowing down and lacks innovation, Huawei CBG builds on its product leadership and leads a new trend of industry innovation by pioneering ground-breaking developments in critical technology areas. In 2016, Huawei CBG has focused on developing meaningful innovations and has made breakthroughs in the areas of operating system (EMUI based on Android), dual-camera technology, artificial intelligence and more.
For the operating system, in order to solve the issue of Android phones slowing down over time, which has frustrated Android users for years, Huawei’s software R&D team conduct in-depth optimization on the Android system. Based on this work, Huawei unveiled EMUI 5.0 – software that is deeply integrated with the Kirin chipset and contains 20+ Huawei patented technologies, to take full advantage of the combination of Huawei software and hardware. This includes highly optimized system resource allocation controlled by a smart learning system and further optimized Android system applications – resolving the long-term Android performance flaw and bringing a brand-new Android experience to users. 
For photography, Huawei and Leica jointly developed two generations of dual-camera in 2016, leading a new trend of smartphone photography and establishing new benchmarks for image quality that made the Huawei P9 series and Mate 9 series popular with consumers. In September 2016, Huawei also founded the Max Berek Innovation Lab with Leica. In the future, this innovation lab will conduct joint research and development in the fields of optical systems, imaging algorithms, VR and AR.
For artificial intelligence, Huawei focused on perception intelligence, cognitive intelligence and computational intelligence and created an artificial intelligence system based on collaboration between software, the device and the cloud. Huawei has also made technological breakthroughs in areas such as sensor algorithms, computer vision, search engine, semantic understanding and introduced Huawei situational intelligence that can provide smarter services to users in different scenarios. Huawei has also launched a desktop search function that enables users to get more results in a shorter time frame with 
higher accuracy.
Meanwhile, Huawei’s cloud service-centred consumer ecosystem is taking shape in China, offering global business opportunities to developers and forming an open and transparent Huawei software ecosystem. Today, Huawei CBG has over 200 million cloud service mobile users and over 220,000 registered developers. Partners were sharing over 2.8 billion RMB in revenue in 2016 through Huawei cloud services. 
According to IPSOS research, Huawei global brand awareness rose from 76 percent in 2015 to 81 percent in 2016. Significantly, overseas users’ consideration and preference for Huawei rose by 66.7 percent and 100 percent, respectively from 2015. Sleek design, fashionable and powerful innovation are increasingly becoming the keywords that overseas users associate with Huawei smartphones. Research also showed that 31 percent of Huawei overseas users belong to the top 30 percent high-income earners in their countries.