The former Huawei subsidiary Honor is also expected to grow extremely outside of China in the next few years. Having become number 1 in the smartphone market in China, Honor is now targeting global growth, according to CEO George Zhao.

As Zhao told the state-run China Securities Journal, Honor plans to start large-scale international sales of its smartphones and other products soon. The growth expected as a result will probably run without any bottlenecks for the next five years - i.e. it should continue steadily without significant hurdles standing in the way.

More money for research and development than for marketing

In order to be able to compete internationally, Honor is planning major investments, but wants to focus primarily on development and research. More money should flow into "research and development" than into marketing, while other manufacturers such as Samsung or Apple work with significantly larger marketing budgets.

This would also be a difference compared to the former parent company Huawei, because Huawei also used an enormous marketing budget to drive its rise to become one of the largest smartphone suppliers in the world before the US embargo came into force. Zhao stressed that at present, more than half of Honor's 12,000 employees work in the R&D departments.

Internationally, Honor is still in a difficult position. In China, it has grown significantly in the 18 months since the split from Huawei and in March 2022 it secured the top spot among the smartphone manufacturers active there for the first time. Globally, however, Honor's reach is still limited, so that Honor is still not part of the top 5 internationally successful smartphone manufacturers in terms of quantities.

In its efforts to grow worldwide, Honor will not have an easy road ahead of it, after all there is a gigantic competition in which, in addition to Apple and Samsung, other Chinese manufacturers such as Xiaomi as well as Oppo and Vivo with their various subsidiary brands and spin-offs with attractive devices and prices are competing for the wrestle with customers.