HONOR wants to be a top 3 brand by 2022, will start with world's first 5G phone

At a large event over the weekend in Beijing, George Zhao — the president of the Honor smartphone brand, a sub-brand of Huawei — made some bold claims in regards to the company. Zhao says that an HONOR 5G phone will be the world’s first and that the launch of the device will help propel HONOR to be one of the world’s biggest smartphone brands.

According to Zhao, HONOR will be a top-five smartphone brand by 2020 and be a top-three brand by 2022.

Since HUAWEI is already a top-three brand, one can only speculate that HUAWEI expects to stay on as a top-three brand in 2022 as well, which means the company expects to have two brands in the top three simultaneously.

That doesn’t leave much room for other companies in the top three. We can only guess that HUAWEI expects the top three to eventually be HUAWEI, HONOR, and Apple, as its far more likely that Samsung will get knocked out of the top three before Apple does.

At the event, Zhao talked at length about 5G technology and how HUAWEI and HONOR have been at the forefront with 5G, much more so than its competitors. He also talked at length about the HONOR brand’s incredible growth over the years and how the focus of the company is now squarely on the future, and not on short-term goals.

However, at no point during the event did he give any concrete information on the mysterious HONOR 5G phone, simply stating that an HONOR 5G phone will land in 2019 and will be the first to market.

Several other companies have already made the claim that they would be the first with a 5G device, including LG and even HONOR’s parent company Huawei. However, it’s likely that HUAWEI is considering the HONOR 5G phone as the first “Huawei” phone to market, as it also has yet to disclose any concrete information about 5G devices.

The long-awaited 5G revolution will likely start by the end of this year with a carrier in the United States turning on the first official commercial 5G network. But it will likely be early 2019 before we have a phone that can connect to that network (natively, anyway), and even then 5G will only be available in very select locations.

What do you think? Do you think it’s possible that the HONOR brand could be a dominant player in just two years time? Let us know in the comments!

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