SMARTPHONE maker Honor is ratcheting up efforts to launch more high-end smartphones in the home market as well as overseas in order to challenge Apple’s dominance in the segment, its CEO told the National Business Daily in a report published yesterday. The Shenzhen-based company that Huawei spun off in 2020 has regained its market share on its home turf, becoming the second largest smartphone company in China after Apple in the fourth quarter last year, according to data from Counterpoint Research. “After surviving the competition on the domestic market, our succeeding goals are to continue to close the gap with Apple and achieve doubled sales on the overseas market,” Zhao Ming was quoted as saying. “We’ve been focusing our efforts on how to outperform Apple by improving our hardware designs and operating system.” Honor also adjusted marketing strategies by setting lower prices for its newly launched Magic 4 series to vie for a larger market share. “We want not only to outperform Apple in terms of user experience and phone function, but also to let the users feel our determination and win their support,” Zhao said. Zhao compared the new Magic 4 series with iPhones in the launch ceremony last week, saying that Magic 4 Pro outperforms iPhone 13 Pro in both gaming use scenarios and other mixed usage scenarios but is priced much lower. Zhao said the company will widen its product range by adding laptops, earphones and tablets to its current product list and plans to launch on the international market at least one new product every month in the upcoming three to four months. “Our team is fully prepared for that pace of new product launch, in either Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia-Pacific or Latin America,” he said. Zhao also hoped Honor will collaborate with carmakers to explore smartphone applications in cars.(Liu Minxia) | 