It's no secret that Huawei's smartphone efforts haven't been noticed by many American consumers. More troubling, though, seems to be news coming out of the company's value sub-brand Honor in recent days. Speaking to a source, we've heard anecdotally that Honor US continues to be the target of layoffs in Huawei Device's larger US presence, but a tipster also reached out to us last week with this bizarre email about the company migrating user data out of the United States.
The email itself is pretty dull, and Honor never actually says why they're migrating Huawei ID data from the US to Germany. It's the tone it takes that is... concerning.
Honor is a global brand, and our philosophy is always to be customer centric. We believe in delivering the best service to our customers and adapting and evolving to embrace new innovations. Honor continues to build on its strength to develop and enhance our products, services and new inventions. Whenever challenges arise, we stay true to our passion and persist to achieve our dreams, continually striving for new accomplishments.
At Honor, we keep moving forward to discover the world, take risks and are always ready to be inspired from our experience. We pursue our mission guided by a belief that tomorrow can always be better as we are committed to staying true to ourselves and daring to be different!
I don't know about you, but that very much reads like a "winding down" sort of email to me - the question is just what is winding down. "Challenges" tends to be a word companies use when they're describing oh, say, an unmitigated disaster of some kind. And I'm not saying anything like such a disaster is happening over at Honor US, but there's nothing happening over there that seems particularly encouraging, either. Perhaps it's merely that Huawei's online services division is consolidating and closing down its US presence. We've reached out to Honor in the hopes that they'll be able to clarify the situation.
The company's newest offering, the Honor 6X, has a dismal number of Amazon reviews (the old 5X has over 2,300) and shipped with Marshmallow, a rather poor choice on Honor's part. While an upcoming Nougat update does a lot to fix the phone, Huawei really didn't do it many favors aside from buying a ton of paid content promotion. Despite what must have been an expensive campaign, the amount of buzz around the phone seems minimal, and one of the most popular videos about it is one in which it is thoroughly destroyed.
After several years of trying, Huawei has failed to effectively break into the US smartphone market, and that's got to be taking a toll on the company's enthusiasm about its prospects here. It started with the Mate 2 around three years ago. About a year after that came the P8 Lite, a phone that was quickly forgotten. After that, we saw the releases come more quickly: the Honor 5X, Honor 8, and Huawei GX8. Only the 5X seems to have ever had any real traction, though, and so it would be logical to assume that Honor was hinging its hopes on the successor replicating and then outdoing that performance. It doesn't seem to be working out that way.
In fact, embarrassingly, the old Honor 5X still far outsells the new 6X on Amazon. It's #15 on the unlocked phone best sellers list. The Honor 6X sits way down at position #80, just a few spots above the Nokia Lumia 520. Not exactly a good look.
Anyway, the full email text is below if you're interested.