From changing the coach for change to understanding Honor's global ambition.
Global corporate leadership changes are often an epitome of strategic and cyclical shifts.
In 2024, the global economy is full of uncertainties. Global companies that used to "rely on economic cycles" have also ushered in an unprecedented wave of leadership changes. According to statistics from the global reemployment agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas, as of October 2024, more than 1,800 corporate leaders in the US market alone have announced their departures, a year-on-year increase of 19%, and this is also the highest record since tracking began in 2002.
Behind this large list, there are many globally renowned corporate leaders. From Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who suddenly announced his departure in December, to Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan, who has only been in office for 17 months, to Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun, who is facing frequent aviation safety accidents. Looking back at the leadership change wave in the past year, it is not difficult to find that global companies, which are closely related to external environmental factors such as the economy and policies, cannot rely on one person to permanently steer the ship.
In order to gain a firm foothold in the turbulent market environment, companies need to continuously adapt to the changes of the times and make adjustments. Choosing the right leader at the right stage and promoting organizational change and innovation with a new strategic vision and thinking is the key to opening a new cycle.
On January 17, the dispute over the leadership change of Honor finally came to an end. Honor officially announced on the internal network that Li Jian, a former influential figure from Huawei, would replace Zhao Ming. That afternoon, Zhao Ming also published an open letter on the Honor internal network, gracefully bidding farewell to Honor.
This is the fifth year since Honor became independent from Huawei. If Zhao Ming completed the construction of the new Honor from 0 to 1, then Li Jian, the former influential figure from Huawei, will embark on the global journey from 1 to 100 with the posture of "Honor of the World".
For the mobile phone industry, a more noteworthy question is: As one of the top five domestic mobile phone manufacturers, what is the background of this new leader of Honor and how will he lead Honor to become the "Honor of the World" in the future?
With Huawei's Strong Return and the First Year of AI Phone Battle, How Will the Former Huawei Influential Figure Respond?
2024 is not only the first year of the AI Phone battle but also the turning point for the recovery of the Chinese mobile phone market.
According to data released by Canalys on January 16, the mobile phone shipments in the Chinese market reached 285 million units this year, with a mild year-on-year growth of 4%. That is to say, after experiencing a decline in the past two years and reaching the lowest shipment volume in ten years, the Chinese mobile phone market has officially ushered in a recovery.
However, the recovery of market demand cannot hide the fierce competition in the red ocean. Currently, the top five mobile phone manufacturers dominate this globally most competitive market with a 78% market share, and a war ignited by AI is continuously spreading. Large models are moving from the cloud to terminal hardware, and AI is penetrating from the upper-level applications to the underlying operating system. No mobile phone manufacturer can remain indifferent in the first year of AI Phones.
In particular, as the players on the table have made achievements in multiple segmented fields such as mobile imaging, satellite communication, and foldable screens, the standard of flagship models is constantly being reshaped in rounds of technical competitions, and a new round of demand for phone replacements has emerged, leading to a rapid change in the market pattern.
For example, Huawei, which has made a strong comeback with the Kirin chip and the native HarmonyOS, leads the Chinese mobile phone market with an annual growth rate of 37%, while vivo has maintained its basic market share with a stable strategy and leads the annual market with a 17% share. When Xiaomi Mobile is continuously recovering under the ecological empowerment of the automotive business, Honor, which is committed to building a platform-level AI, ranked fifth in 2024.
Perhaps from the ranking perspective, Honor seems to have fallen behind. But in terms of actual development, this is first due to the objective impact caused by Huawei's return.
An undeniable fact is that Honor, as a sub-brand of Huawei before its independence, had a large overlap with Huawei in the target customer group. Now, Huawei, which has solved the supply chain problem, has attracted many users who originally chose Honor to return with the Kirin chip and the native HarmonyOS in 2024.
And these users often come from the high-end market above $600, which is desperately desired by mobile phone manufacturers. It can be said that in the smartphone industry where self-developed chips and operating systems are regarded as a symbol of high-end, Huawei, after its return, has taken a part of Honor's cake in the high-end market.
The second is the price involution in the mid-to-low-end market. When cost performance has become the keyword of the era, brands represented by Xiaomi, OPPO, and VIVO have begun to focus on the all-round improvement of performance, imaging, screen, and battery life, and have caused certain market pressure on Honor by virtue of the mature channels they have built online and offline in the past.
In particular, when the national subsidy policy at the beginning of 2025 began to target the purchasing power in the mid-to-low-end market, and Huawei, which has entered Apple's territory, is continuously regaining lost ground in various price bands, the challenges faced by Honor will only become more severe, and a new leader is urgently needed to open up a path of strategic change.
Why is this new leader Li Jian, the former influential figure from Huawei? A careful review of Li Jian's public resume reveals the reason.
In 2001, after graduating with a master's degree, Li Jian joined Huawei. During this period, he was responsible for multiple fields such as sales, human resources, technology, management, and supervision. In 2017, he entered the Huawei Supervisory Board, participated in major reforms and strategic formulation of Huawei, and also had outstanding leadership performances in many important battles.
What is the concept of the Huawei Supervisory Board? According to the public information of Huawei, the Huawei Supervisory Board is the highest supervisory body of Huawei, with 15 members. It not only exercises supervision rights on behalf of shareholders but also is responsible for the survival, development, and strategic management of the company, competing with the board of directors in the modern corporate governance structure.
With a working period of up to 20 years at Huawei, Li Jian has grown into an influential figure of Huawei. And this solid experience and resume have also enabled Li Jian to successively hold positions such as vice chairman and director after joining Honor in 2021, becoming a core member of the Honor management team.
If strategy tests the vision to traverse cycles, then professional technology is the basis for gaining trust. Just like Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, when safety accidents occurred frequently in 2020, it appointed a financial executive, Calhoun, who lacked an engineering background as the corporate leader, which raised doubts in the public opinion about Boeing's ability to reshape its safety image.
The mobile phone industry involves extremely dispersed technical fields, ranging from hardware to software to communications, and Honor's choice is more cautious. Like He Gang, the CEO of Huawei Terminal BG, Li Jian also graduated from Xidian University. During his work at Huawei, Li Jian participated in the development of Huawei's 3G base station products, as well as the key technology research and development of wireless algorithms and smart antennas. For an ICT manufacturer like Honor, having a solid technical background is essential.
Four years ago, Honor was separated from Huawei; four years later, Honor invited the former Huawei influential figure, Li Jian, to "take the helm".
Whether facing Huawei's return or the competition from other mobile phone manufacturers, the "new Honor" led by Li Jian needs to come up with more differentiated strategies to respond to the market. After all, in the Chinese mobile phone market, which is the most competitive globally, mobile phone manufacturers that do not advance will only be destined to become "others".
Starting from 2016 when it began to layout AI and first proposed the concept of "Mobile Phone AI", to 2018 when it launched the self-learning and self-evolving intelligent life form YOYO; from 2022 when it built a platform-level AI with MagicOS 7.0 to further explore the intent recognition human-computer interaction, to 2024 when it brought the industry's first intent recognition human-computer interaction with MagicOS 8.0 that reconstructs the operating system with AI, and to the industry's first personalized full-scene AI operating system MagicOS 9.0 with an intelligent body. Currently, Honor, which has invested more than 10 billion R&D expenses in the AI field and has 2,100 AI patent achievements, has taken an independent high-end path different from Huawei and Apple's paradigms with the construction of the platform-level AI.
In terms of the solution to the AI Phone era, the uniqueness of Honor lies in that it realizes cross-system intelligent interconnection with platform-level AI capabilities, allowing services and devices to truly follow users with a "people-centered" approach.
This also corresponds to the assertion that "data is the new oil in the new era". In the AI era where data has become personal assets, Honor's innovative value of being people-centered has attracted the participation of many ecological partners.
With the platform-level AI capabilities that span devices, operating systems, and ecosystems, Honor has turned open operating systems such as Android, Windows, and IoT into an integrated ecosystem, and has reached cooperation with global technology giants such as Google, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. Based on the first two layers of the end-side AI framework proposed by Honor, an innovative layout of the "Honor of the World" is accelerating its formation.
Today, after eight years of exploration and deep cultivation in the end-side AI field and four years after its independence, Honor has finally won a place in the international market dominated by Apple and Samsung. According to the Canalys report, in the third quarter of 2024, Honor ranked among the top five in the global high-end market (above $600).
In the foldable screen field where innovation is lacking, Honor has broken Samsung's dominance in the European foldable screen market. According to Counterpoint data, in the second quarter of 2024, Honor's foldable screen surpassed Samsung to become the number one in Western Europe. In the global foldable screen market, Honor also leads other mobile phone manufacturers with a year-on-year growth of 455% in shipments.
The Next Global Journey: Honor Creates the "Honor of the World" Again
In November 2020, after painfully announcing the sale of Honor, Huawei, which was facing US sanctions, held an internal farewell party. At the meeting, Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei regarded this separation as a "divorce" and straightforwardly said that "once divorced, there should be no lingering ties", hoping that Honor would become Huawei's strongest global competitor.
From restoring channel supply as soon as possible, to fully embracing global industrial resources, establishing relationships with suppliers as soon as possible, and unswervingly embracing globalization - this internal speech not only reveals Ren Zhengfei's reluctance but also shows his expectations for Honor.
Looking back at Honor later, it indeed has been moving forward step by step towards the high expectations once placed on it.
At the beginning of its independence, the chip supply chain resources shared with Huawei were completely cut off, and Honor needed to renegotiate and cooperate with chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek. In the highly competitive smartphone market in 2021, Honor's market share once dropped to 3%. However, with the subsequent mature construction of systematic capabilities from products to R&D to the supply chain, according to IDC data, Honor's market share rapidly climbed from 11.7% to 18.1% from 2021 to 2022.
By investing more than 10% of its annual revenue in R&D, Honor has now completed the leap from 0 to 1.
On the one hand, it has built a rich product line including the Magic series, GT series, Play series, and X series to cover different market segments; on the other hand, it has also achieved industry breakthroughs in core technologies such as AI and foldable screens. From releasing a new AI strategic architecture at the Barcelona MWC in 2024 to the stunning appearance of the Magic V3 that can withstand a 2-meter drop at the IFA in Germany. In industrial collaboration, Honor not only jointly released the "6G Terminal Vision White Paper" with GSMA but also participated in the implementation of the terminal AI classification standard with several major domestic mobile phone manufacturers.
Whether it is the maturity of technology and products or being listed in the domestic and international markets, Honor now has more confidence in strategic choices. This is why at the critical window of completing the shareholding reform and approaching the IPO, Honor can appoint Li Jian, the former influential figure from Huawei, with the goal of creating another "Honor of the World".
From a global perspective, Li Jian, who has worked at Huawei for 20 years and has rich overseas experience, is the most suitable candidate for the helm.
When Honor officially announced its entry into the Indonesian market at the beginning of this year, Li Jing, the President of Honor South Pacific Region, described the globalization of Chinese mobile phone manufacturers in an interview with the media. In his view, the globalization pace of Chinese mobile phone manufacturers has shifted from "expansion" to "competing for the top".
In particular, as Chinese mobile phone manufacturers continue to climb towards the two ends of the smile curve, the new round of technological wave represented by AI has brought everyone to the same starting line. Competing head-on with mobile phone giants such as Apple and Samsung in the global market is the key issue in the next stage.
Looking at the resume of the new leader Li Jian, he was first stationed in Nigeria as a product manager. At that time, the African market for Huawei had a strong "wild exploration" color. The ambiguous division of labor between R&D, products, and sales gave the product manager Li Jian the function of sales. And this diverse and complex experience enabled Li Jian to be promoted to the President of Huawei West Africa Region by signing a $30 million contract in 3 months, managing a team of nearly 2,000 people.
This diversity is also reflected in different regions. The sales performance of the Nigerian market has ranked first in the world for four consecutive years, not only making Li Jian reach the position of President of Huawei West Africa Region, but also including later positions such as President of Northeast Europe Region, President of Europe Region, and President of Americas Region, involving important leadership positions such as strategic management, global sales, company transformation, cadre management, human resources, and supervision.
Looking back at Honor's globalization path after its independence, from starting the expansion of the overseas market in 2022 to announcing that Europe will be regarded as the second domestic market in 2023; from ranking among the top five mobile phone brands in the Latin American market in the first quarter of 2024, to surpassing Samsung to become the first in the Western European foldable screen market in the second quarter, and to the monthly overseas market sales volume catching up with the Chinese market in December - it can be predicted that Honor, which has initially consolidated the foundation for the development of the overseas market, will steadily move towards the next global cycle under the leadership of Li Jian.
