As smartphone players in India begin to infuse Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities into devices while looking at Cloud for safe and secure deposit of massive data, Chinese telecom giant Huawei will ramp up its efforts towards building devices with these capabilities for the Indian market, a top company executive has said.
“AI is the hot technology now. Huawei is making huge investments into this technology. We have the software and we have the chipset. It is important not only for consumer electronics but also for many other things as well. Thousands of engineers are working on this project,” Peter Zhai, President, Huawei India Consumer Business Group, told IANS in an interview.
Huawei unveiled its first mobile AI computing platform “Kirin 970” early in September in its bid to pack smart devices with powerful AI features to offer better user experience. The company is positioning it as an open platform for mobile AI, opening up the chipset to developers and partners who can find new and innovative uses for its processing capabilities.
In a benchmark image recognition test, the “Kirin 970” processed 2,000 images per minute which was faster than other chips on the market, according to Huawei.Huawei also wants to be the biggest consumer electronics company in the world, Zhai said.
“The consumer electronics business constitutes around 27 per cent of Huawei’s overall business. It is a very important part of our business and we will continue to work towards capturing greater market share in India’s consumer electronics business,” Zhai said, adding that the next focus for the technology giant is the Cloud enterprise market.
“India is very important for Huawei. The Indian smartphone market is now the second-largest in the world. It is bigger than the US market. In the next three to five years, it will become closer to China in size. So it will be a very fast-growing market and a very promising market,” Zhai told IANS. “Nobody can ignore India because this market will keep becoming bigger,” he added.
In the third quarter of this year, the Indian smartphone market grew 37 per cent (quarter on quarter) and 18 per cent (year on year). The performance of Chinese brands remained strong and contributed to more than half of the total smartphone shipments, according to market research firm Counterpoint Research.
