Huawei expects more than 100 per cent year-on-year growth in smartphone sales from the UAE this year, a company official said.

Quoting research firm GfK’s stats in the second quarter, David Wang, UAE country manager the for Huawei Consumer Business Group, told Gulf News that Huawei is the second-largest smartphone manufacturer globally and in the UAE after Samsung.

Even though consumer confidence is weak in the UAE, he said that Huawei is seeing a strong confidence in retail sales and hasn’t seen a decrease so far.
“We will increase our market share in the third and fourth quarters with the availability of our new seven-nanometre mobile chipset with more artificial intelligence (AI) features — Kirin 980 — available on our Mate devices next month,” he said.
Only Huawei, Apple and Samsung produce their own chipsets while other manufactures depend on Qualcomm and MediaTek chipsets.

“It took us three years to develop the 980 chip. The first Kirin chipset, launched in 2008, had 130nm. The R&D on the next chipset has already started and it will be launched in October next year,” he said.

With dual NPUs (neural processing units, which are the brains behind AI) on the new chip, he said that it can recognise up to 4,500 images per minute, up 120 per cent compared to Kirin 970 chipset, and it can provide 20 per cent more computing capabilities and 40 per cent less power consumption.

Even though AI is still a niche segment that is still learning, he said that in the next two to three years, it will be able to learn more information from a user’s behaviour and give suggestions.

Huawei claims that the Snapdragon 845 chipset recognises only up to 2,371 images while Apple’s A11 Bionic chip recognises 1,458 images.

“AI will give suggestions to your shopping, entertainment and working as per the environment in the next couple of years. Combining facial recognition and voice recognition, AI can identify the user and can improve the experience depending on the situation. It is not only additional hardware that will serve the purpose, but it is also the combination of hardware and software that will give a better performance and user experience,” he said.