Sean Nero

Lo­cal de­mand for Huawei smart phones is in­creas­ing and has strength­ened the com­pa­ny's glob­al po­si­tion, the com­pa­ny's gen­er­al man­ag­er Ja­son Deng said.

"We have not­ed that smart­phone pur­chas­es have gone up in T&T–in just four short years. In 2010, it was on­ly 63,000 and in 2014, it went up to about 264,000. This shows us that the T&T mar­ket has great po­ten­tial for our de­vice and we are more than ex­cit­ed to now in­tro­duce our of­fer­ings to the T&T con­sumer," he said.

"Our smart­phone sales glob­al­ly have been ex­tra­or­di­nary. We sold over 75 mil­lion units of our de­vices glob­al­ly and saw an in­crease in sales of 45 per cent from last year. We have al­so seen suc­cess in our Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­can mar­kets. So now, af­ter al­most a decade of op­er­at­ing in T&T, Huawei wants to share that same suc­cess here."

Deng was speak­ing at the me­dia launch of the com­pa­ny's new range of hand­sets at the Court­yard by Mar­riott Ho­tel last Thurs­day. The prod­uct un­veil­ing was held joint­ly with Huawei's strate­gic part­ner, state-owned Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT). He said the un­veil­ing marked an ex­cit­ing time for Huawei as it was the first of its kind for the com­pa­ny, lo­cal­ly.

Deng said smart­phones man­u­fac­tured by the com­pa­ny are pop­u­lar glob­al­ly.

"In fact, glob­al brand aware­ness of Huawei de­vices jumped to 65 per cent in 2014, from 26 per cent in 2012. And now, Huawei de­vices have be­comes the third most pop­u­lar brand in the world. Around the world, con­sumers look for­ward to our prod­uct launch­es and we see the same buzz here in T&T.

"We know that those who buy a Huawei smart­phone will not be dis­ap­point­ed. You will ex­pe­ri­ence a new lev­el of us­age un­like any oth­er ex­pe­ri­ence, with the best el­e­ments of style, strength and per­for­mance. We de­liv­er de­vices that are high qual­i­ty and al­ways meet the con­sumer's needs," he said.

Nicole Ker­ry Lum Kin, act­ing ex­ec­u­tive vice-pres­i­dent at TSTT said it was an ex­cit­ing time as the com­pa­ny is able to of­fer sub­scribers more choic­es from an ex­pand­ed port­fo­lio of high qual­i­ty de­vices from one of the world's top man­u­fac­tur­ers. Through the part­ner­ship be­tween the two com­pa­nies, she said, they in­tend­ed to work on de­vel­op­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion so­lu­tions that will beat ex­pec­ta­tions with­out hurt­ing con­sumer's pock­ets.

"We are firm­ly com­mit­ted to be­com­ing the stan­dard bear­er for lead­ing edge com­mu­ni­ca­tion so­lu­tions and ser­vices that will en­rich our lives here in T&T. Tra­di­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion so­lu­tions al­lowed us to cross the bar­ri­ers as­so­ci­at­ed with time and dis­tance: call­ing a friend in south, call­ing a cousin in New York or Chi­na, send­ing a faxed sig­na­ture to con­firm a busi­ness trans­ac­tion," she said.

Lum Kin added: "In to­day's world, com­mu­ni­ca­tion so­lu­tions are rev­o­lu­tion­is­ing in­dus­tries, from gov­ern­ment to sales, to en­ter­tain­ment, health care, ed­u­ca­tion, ad­ver­tis­ing and so on. It is trans­form­ing our world, our pace, our en­tire way of life.

"We at TSTT/bmo­bile un­der­stand our role in this trans­for­ma­tion process and it is this vi­sion that dri­ves and mo­tives us as a com­pa­ny. It shapes and di­rects our strate­gies. It is this vi­sion that en­cour­aged us to part­ner with Huawei back in 2012 to bring 4G to T&T and it is this vi­sion that en­cour­ages us to ex­pand that re­la­tion­ship."