Huawei is a dominant mobile player as viewed by most industry analyst, just ask any sales engineers in NSN or Ericsson and they will rant about how mobile operators prefer network switches supplied by the Chinese company compared to theirs. Pitting itself against such experienced organisation has somewhat molded Huawei into a formidable technology organisation that continues to surprise critics. Mobile devices like the Mate 8 and Honor 6 plus are testaments of the quality of work this company is capable of.

The mercurial rise of Huawei is short of a fairy tale, founded by an army engineer making phone switches the company expanded its business to every aspect of the industry from building telecommunications network, offering back-end solution to cellular operators to communication devices for the consumer market. A complete mobile player…a certain Nokia and Ericsson of former years comes to mind.

But the company is not sitting on its laurels, at the recent Mobile World Congress, a particular Huawei booth was rather abuzz with the revealing of a rather peculiar device of not the mobile phone kind. For the first time the company was introducing to visitors the Matebook an intel powered 2 in 1 laptop. The mobile device brand was stepping into the territory of personal computing. While stalwarts like Acer, Asus, Lenovo, HP and Microsoft have for decades attempted to break into the mobile phone market with some successfully making that transition while some still struggling, Huawei is now taking the fight to the PC makers at a time when sales of PC is dropping year on year but light at the end of the tunnel for 2 in 1’s. Would the Matebook take off?

Enemy at the gates

Lenovo has been dominating the PC market for some time now, the company is now moving into the server enterprise market after acquiring IBM x86 server business back in 2014. Lenovo is also one of those PC makers who has managed to carve a niche in the mobile segment. So confident the company went on to purchase Motorola from Google.

With the most versatile Windows from Microsoft and Intels pursuit to capture the mobile segment, we are seeing these giants luring every possible device makers into their ecosystem. Surface was a breakthrough device which positioned itself snugly between a full fledged laptop and a tablet, the hybrid device has become a runaway success and is now being mimicked by other vendors.

Starting at US699 (RM2900) the 12 inch MateBook is Huawei’s foray into the PC market, the 2 in1 6th Gen Intel Core m-series processor run device is claimed to be the answer for portable, stylish smart devices for users to stay connected while on the go. At that price point Matebook falls into the premium product category, a bold move.

Lines are being blurred with mobility and productivity, thats why most PC vendors must have a strategy for mobile products that run on mobile networks, even HP is returning to this space with the Elite x3. So does Lenovo have to worry about Huawei nudging into its territory? While the former rode on the popularity of its acquisition brand names like Thinkpad, the latter is building its own from start. It was the like of Lenovo that gave confidence to global markets that China is capable of making quality products, while the PC maker has extensive distribution network with being decades ahead, history has shown how new disruption can shake the status quo. Lenovo should not take the entry of Huawei lightly.

However, these are early days and there is no need to press the panic button…yet, but there is nothing Lenovo can do but to continue to push its own USP and create an identity for the brand and its product. With the dominant single operating system and run-off-the-mill processors used in 95% of PC globally, being unique is becoming increasingly rare thus opening up to anyone with hordes of cash to start assembling phones or PC’s. There are just faceless devices with similar insides, and mostly differentiating themselves with prices on who can be lower, a contention doomed to fail.

While the battle is an on going on with many casualties, Google, Microsoft and Intel snigger all the way to the bank.