Huawei’s Pura 80 series roll-out in Dubai is latest move in global smartphone push
The Pura 80 series, which debuted in mainland China last month, marks Huawei’s latest expansion into major overseas markets
Huawei Technologies rolled out the next phase of its global smartphone push on Thursday, with a launch event for the Pura 80 series in Dubai, as the Shenzhen-based tech giant seeks to revive its once-lucrative handset business amid US sanctions.
Three models – the Pura 80, Pura 80 Pro and Pura 80 Ultra – were unveiled at a launch event in Dubai, as Huawei showcased its commitment to the market dominated by Apple and Samsung Electronics even though its devices are not supported by popular apps such as Gmail or Google Maps.
The Pura 80 series, which debuted in mainland China last month and boasts improved photographic capabilities, marks Huawei’s latest expansion into major overseas markets such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe, as the Chinese tech giant seeks to revive its international smartphone business amid US sanctions.
The company also launched the Pura 70 series last May and the Mate X6 series in December.
“The Pura series has always been the smartphones that had the biggest impact in the market,” Andreas Zimmer, head of product at Huawei’s consumer business group, said at the event on Thursday.
“The camera is better. Especially for the Pura 80 Ultra, we’re using really cutting-edge, first-of-its-kind camera technology,” he said, adding that the company was among the first to use telephoto cameras for micro photography on smartphones.
Available in multiple colours, the Pura 80 Pro and Pura 80 Ultra were expected to cost €1,099 (US$1,292) and €1,499 (US$1,763), respectively, for the 512-gigabyte versions, while the price for the standard Pura 80 will be announced later, according to Huawei.
The Pura 80 series will feature an AI agent called Celia for the global version, which is trained on multiple languages including English, Spanish and French, different to the Xiaoyi AI agent used on its Chinese handsets.
The company has not revealed the types of chips used to power its smartphones. However, third-party tear downs found that the Chinese version of Pura 80 used the Kirin 9020, a new generation of processor compared with the Kirin 9010 on the Pura 70 series.
The Kirin mobile system-on-chips are designed by HiSilicon, Huawei’s fabless semiconductor unit, and they were believed to be fabricated by Shanghai-based foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.
Huawei’s consumer business, which includes its smartphones, reported a 38 per cent increase in revenue to 339 billion yuan in 2024, contributing to a 22 per cent increase in its total company revenue.
China’s cloud services spending hits US$11.6 billion in first quarter on AI-related demand
Alibaba leads the market with a 33 per cent share, followed by Huawei and Tencent with shares of 18 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively
“Leading cloud providers are actively exploring pathways for AI adoption, unlocking capabilities and building ecosystems through model open-sourcing, while accelerating task execution and scenario delivery via AI agent platforms,” Canalys senior analyst Yi Zhang said in a report on Thursday.
In the first quarter, partner-driven cloud revenue accounted for 25 per cent of the mainland market, according to Canalys. It added that “this share is expected to grow as ecosystem collaboration becomes a key enabler for turning AI capabilities into business value”.
As enterprises accelerate their AI deployments, the market potential of mainland China’s cloud services sector is being steadily unlocked, according to the Canalys report. It pointed out that “substantial computational demands of foundation models” are driving a marked increase in enterprises’ dependence on cloud-based GPU resources.
“AI is accelerating cloud adoption across the board,” said Rachel Brindley, a senior director at Canalys, adding that “organisations that previously relied on on-premises data centres were now migrating to the cloud to support AI workloads”.
