Earlier this year (Display Monitor Vol 21 No 34), Huawei said that it had not made any profit on its Windows Phone venture. Now Joe Kelly, head of international media affairs, has gone a step further, telling media, “Nobody made any money” with the OS.
Even with deep discounts, Windows Phone was not worth the expense, Huawei said earlier this year. In September, the company’s Shao Yung told The Register, “The biggest problem is that Windows is not easy to develop independently on this platform…R&D costs for Windows are quite high relative to the cost of sales”. Considering that Windows Phone is free to license, that’s not a point in the system’s favour!
Kelly told the Seattle Times that Huawei now plans to aim for the upper end of the market, although admitted that “We will lose volume in that shift”.
