Chinese telecommunications company, Huawei, is to launch a new smart phone and create 500 UK jobs to help its digital innovation centre to secure its position as a market leader in the UK.
The phone will be its first own-branded phone in the UK and the jobs will be a mix of research, sales and marketing and customer service jobs.
Victor Zhang, Chief Executive of Huawei Technologies UK, told The Huffington Post: "The new staff will be a mix across our business areas. For our customer service people, we will be specifically looking for people with an engineering and technology background that can communicate well with our customers and give them a good experience.
"We will be working on getting a better service experience from phones. So, making your calls clearer and connecting to networks better. We are also looking at lowering the power consumption in home ADSL modems by using our new chipset," he added.
The intake will bring their staff up to 1000, and will work on telecommunications, enterprise and devices like mobile phones, dongles and datacards. Huawei already works closely with UK universities to help match graduates with skills that the company needs. This year eight undergraduates have spent five weeks in China learning language and technical skills at the company.
The new Huawei Vision handset to be launched on 7 November, the Vision, follows the launch of the Huawei Blaze - a "good quality low-priced gadget" according to the Telegraph.
Two major initiatives at once could be interpreted as a serious play on the UK mobile phone market, but Huawei has been in the UK since 2001. Their handests have been released under other brands, and the company's business here includes telecommunications contracts with BT and modem contracts with Vodafone.
Thomas Husson, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, told The Huffington Post: "Huawei mostly used to work closely with operators to offer white-label customised products, initially 3G keys and dongles and more recently smartphones. This is the first time that Huawei has changed the names of their phones (the “vision” or the “honor” – instead of their traditional naming (U8230 or E5)) to position their devices in a more consumer-centric approach."
"The challenge will be to establish a new consumer brand but while Huawei is ambitious they are likely to capture growth in the low-end of the market – which will be increasingly difficult with strong brands continuing to promote smartphones at increasingly cheaper prices (think of the iPhone 3GS)."