Huawei is banking on foldable smartphones to fight PCs

Huawei is perhaps best known first for its smartphones and second for its networking hardware. However, it has also dipped its fingers into the PC market with the likes of the MateBook series. That said, it might not actually believe that this age-old form of personal computers or PCs are going to be around forever. Unsurprisingly, it believes that the future is in the most personal kind of computer you have: your smartphone.

In an interview with German news site Die welt, Huawei CEO Richard Yu said that the next big thing after the smartphone is none other than the smartphone. He believes there is still a lot of room for innovation in that space, from AI to AR to foldable phones. The latter was framed as a replacement for PCs, solving the problem of a smartphone having too small a display to be productive.

Yu also mentioned that you won't have to wait a year for such a device to come out. In fact, if rumors are correct, it might have something to show late this year at the earliest. It might not be the final product but Huawei is racing against Samsung to be "first in the market". Now it seems Huawei is also going to rise up against Microsoft as well.

The company definitely has the bravado for such challenges, despite the fact that it is facing strong opposition in the US. In fact, Yu boasted that it is US companies that benefit from its innovations and that it's largely unaffected by the current trade spat between US and Chinese governments. That said, it is crying foul over the US' latest ban on the use of its equipment in government.

Huawei, however, is becoming a force that cannot be ignored. At least for the time being, it has unseated Apple as the world's second largest smartphone maker and plans to rise to the top. Perhaps with a bit of hubris, Yu claims it's simply the natural course of things and that smartphone market share isn't that important to Huawei. That is, until that market share suddenly nosedives.