Huawei launches Honor Note 10 with 7-inch screen to tap gaming market

Honor, one of the twin signature smartphone brands owned by Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, is investing more resources to lure gaming enthusiasts with a new smartphone.

Honor Note 10, as the new device is named, comes with a 7-inch screen and efficient data-processing capabilities which makes it "perfect" to play resource-heavy games, said Zhao Ming, president of Honor,on Tuesday in Beijing.

"Tech-savvy and trendy young consumers have a growing demand to play sophisticated games on smartphones. That is an important niche," Zhao said.

Priced from 2,799 yuan ($410) in China, Note 10 is equipped with GPU Turbo, a technology developed by Huawei to boost smartphones' image processing efficiency by 60 percent while lowering chip energy consumption by as much as 30 percent.

Honor, which primarily focuses on millennials and people in pursuit of young lifestyle, has sold over 26 million smartphones in the first half of this year, with revenue hitting 37.8 billion yuan.

It is also stepping up push to expand presence in the overseas countries as the Chinese smartphones market saturated.

In Russia, Honor has been among the top three brands in sales volume for 12 consecutive months and secured second place recently. In France, it has become the fourth biggest brand in revenue and fifth biggest in sales volume.

The Chinese brand is also the fastest growing smartphone vendor in India, with a 300 percent increase in sales volume and revenue over the first six months of this year. The company is now looking at prospects in Southeast Asia this year, in its quest for a new growth engine.

In 2018, Zhao projected foreign markets will contribute 25 percent of total sales. This comes after overseas sales accounted for 15 percent of the brand's sales last year.

Honor was created in 2013 to complement the Huawei brand which chiefly targets business professionals and government officials. So far, the dual-brand strategy has been quite successful in both at home and abroad.

Huawei said on Tuesday that it is confident it will maintain sound momentum for the whole of 2018, after its revenue for the first six months reached 325.7 billion yuan ($47.6 billion), outperforming the slowing global telecom and smartphone market.

Huawei said its revenue grew 15 percent year-on-year, maintaining the same expansion rate as the first six months of 2017. The stable result comes thanks in part to solid performance across its consumer device, enterprise business and cloud divisions.

Its operating profit margin stood at 14 percent, up 3 percentage points from a year ago.