Chinese firms make mark at US tech expo
By Li Qiaoyi
Domestic firms show ambition for overseas expansion
Crowds surround a ZTE booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Photo: Courtesy of ZTE
The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world's largest consumer electronics trade show, has been held again in Las Vegas, showcasing emerging trends of the year in the technology arena.
Running from Tuesday through Friday, this year's CES continues its dazzling blend of electronics in daily life, having gathered a number of exhibitors. Many of them come from China where surging demand for consumer electronics goods, and smartphones in particular, has led to the emergence of local brands.
More than 25 percent of exhibitors participating in the 2015 CES are from China, Chinese tech news portal tech.qq.com reported on Tuesday, citing the organizer of the show, in a sign of Chinese technology firms' growing ambition to grab the limelight on the global stage.
In response to surging demand from Chinese participants, CES is also set to launch CES Asia in Shanghai in May.
During the show, ZTE Star 2, the newest phone sporting smart voice controls produced by Chinese smartphone maker ZTE Corp, was put on display, in the latest sign that the Shenzhen-based firm is set to make further inroads into the smartphone sector and eyeing a bigger share of the global smartphone realm, ZTE said in a statement e-mailed to the Global Times on Wednesday, quoting Zeng Xuezhong, chief executive of ZTE Mobile Devices.
In an exclusive interview with the Global Times in late October, Zeng said the firm, a longtime business-to-business equipment and solutions provider, is taking an unswerving approach toward becoming consumer oriented.
Driven by the robustness of its mobile device businesses, especially in China, the US and Japan, ZTE posted a 191 percent profit growth in the third quarter of 2014, according to its latest quarterly financial report released on October 23.
ZTE is hardly alone at the show, as its domestic peers including its cross-town rival Huawei Technologies Co and Beijing-based Lenovo Group showed up as well, flexing their muscles in the tech world.
Taking the stage
Among a range of gadgets Huawei displayed at the show, the Honor 6 Plus flagship smartphone featuring three eight-megapixel cameras came under the spotlight, although Huawei has yet to perform as impressively as ZTE in the US market.
The US market has proven to be a particular hotspot for ZTE, where the handset maker recorded an increase of 40 percent-year-on-year in shipments, according to the latest statistics revealed in November by US-based market research firm Strategy Analytics Inc.
But for Huawei, which secured the third spot on the worldwide smartphone sales rankings in the third quarter of 2014, albeit a long way from the top two vendors - Samsung Electronics and Apple Inc - per data released by US market research firm Gartner Inc in mid-December, a breakthrough in the US market is still expected.
Huawei's share of the US market in 2014 was even less than that logged in 2013, Shao Yang, vice president of marketing at Huawei's Consumer Business Group, told tech.qq.com at the CES on Wednesday, without disclosing the exact figures.
To crack the US market, Huawei has strengthened its partnerships with US telecom carriers who have long played a dominant role in the local phone arena. On top of that, Huawei launched gethuawei.com in June 2014 in a direct-to-consumer approach to selling its phones in the US market.
Huawei is expected to unveil its Honor series, which has been marketed as an independent smartphone brand by the company since December 2013, on its proprietary e-commerce site in the second quarter of 2015, tech.qq.com reported on Wednesday.
Lenovo is also among a slew of Chinese tech firms that have gained the limelight at the show, in part due to its announcement that it would bring Motorola smartphones back to the China market.
Following the completion of Lenovo's acquisition of Motorola Mobility from Google Inc, Motorola is preparing itself for a return to China with the new Moto X, Moto X Pro and Moto G, which are slated to hit the Chinese market starting from February, the company said in a statement e-mailed to the Global Times on Wednesday.
Prices of the devices are currently unknown.
Lenovo will continue with its dual-brand strategy, with Motorola targeting matured markets while Lenovo will stay focused on emerging markets, Liu Jun, president of Mobile Business Group at Lenovo and chairman of the Motorola Management Board, told reporters on Tuesday (US time).
Translating limelight into salesPhones from Beijing-based Xiaomi Inc were also on the ground in Las Vegas, although traces of its rumored next-generation Mi5 flagship smartphone were not seen at the event.
Throughout 2014, Xiaomi, which only started selling smartphones in October 2011, had had a banner year, catapulting itself to the top echelon of phone vendors globally.
In the third quarter of last year, Xiaomi held fourth place in the global marketplace for smartphones as measured by sales to end users with a share of 5.2 percent, according to the latest figures from Gartner, beating all but Samsung, Apple and Huawei, which had market share of 24.4 percent, 12.7 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively.
Over the course of 2014, Xiaomi sold 61.12 million smartphones worldwide, soaring 227 percent from the previous year, Lei Jun, its founder and CEO, said on his Weibo account on January 4.
But for the budget phone maker, which bases its bewildering growth mainly on the wide acceptance of its competitively priced gadgets on its home turf, an expansion into other markets would be of critical importance to its future growth, prompting the company to be present at events such as CES.
Still, analysts noted that showing up at the global event won't automatically translate the limelight into sales figures.
The presence of a range of Chinese firms at the CES signifies the rising prominence of domestic brands which have proven their expertise in manufacturing but might still not be ready to take on the likes of Apple, Bryan Wang, Beijing-based vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
Chinese technology news portal tech.sina.com.cn said in an article published on Wednesday that while Apple continues to be absent from the CES, traces of the Cupertino, California-based tech giant can still be found almost everywhere at the show, as most of the visitors crowding the exhibition halls were seen shooting a wide variety of gismos using an iPhone.
