The email couldn’t be simpler: “Hereby the contract with the signature of our CEO. Can you sign as well?” From: Huawei Communications & Public Affairs. Or in other words, we’ve got a new sponsor: Huawei!
The email didn’t just randomly drop in our inbox of course. We’ve been trying to get a Chinese smartphone sponsor for quite a while now. There are lots of Chinese smartphone players out there, some of them unknown outside of China.
Half of Huawei’s 140,000 employees are working in R&D
We then heard from family back in Holland that there was this Chinese smartphone brand called “who-a-why” doing TV commercials all of a sudden. “We’ve never heard of who-a-why”, we said. “Are you sure it’s Chinese?”. “Who-a-why” of course turned out to be “Huawei” (pronounced as “hwa-way” in China, but as “who-a-why” in Holland). A brand we definitely knew.
Since we learned from BYD that contacting Chinese brands worked best when contacting their overseas offices, we only emailed (a lot of) Dutch people working at Huawei: Richard, David, Theo, Katia, Marc, Diana, another Richard and Marco. That same day we got an email back (from a colleague of David). It was easy for them to pitch it internally, since everybody saw our email already.
So who is Huawei? Since its founding in 1987 with just $3300 on the bank, Huawei has become a well-known telecommunications company building 4G networks around the world.
The past few years Huawei has shifted its business focus to the consumer market with smartphones and tablets. A challenging place to be in between Apple and Samsung. But with almost half of its 140,000 employees working in R&D, Huawei sees itself as a visionary challenger that can compete with the giants.
They’re challenging the worlds biggest brands in one of the most competitive markets: smartphones
We’ve been talking to them for 5 weeks now and they’re super friendly and strongly believe in the brand new China concept. Although we copy/pasted that “visionary challenger” term from their brand book, it actually really feels that way when talking with them. They’re challenging the worlds biggest brands in one of the most competitive markets: smartphones. That’s exactly the spirit we like: nothing is easy, but everything is possible. Therefore we’re extremely proud to have them on board as our official smartphone sponsor.
We’ll be traveling with their latest flagship model, the Ascend P7, also known as the ‘selfie smartphone’. It has an 8 megapixel front camera and can take panorama group selfies (dubbed ‘groufies’) and selfie videos in 1080p quality. Watch a video about the P7 on Youtube.
We’ll be sure to be ‘groufing’ around “the ‘stans” with our Huawei smartphone.