The Chinese smartphone maker’s three-storey flagship store has been in the works since 2017. It spans 1,300 square meters and is manned by 120 consultants who hail from various fields including hotel, art, and aviation.
Chinese manufacturing giant, Huawei, officially opened its global flagship store on Saturday morning at Vientiane, the heart of Shenzhen’s vibrant MixC World and it is Huawei’s first direct-sale store in the world. Shenzhen is a huge commercial Chinese city and the Shenzhen Vientiane World was opened on September 27, 2017.
The Store which covers a total area of 1300 square meters has been in preparation since 2017 and customers can explore Huawei’s latest and most comprehensive products, experience the fastest 5G connection, relax and meet up with friends. Huawei’s global flagship store will have anything and everything with the Huawei label on it, hence why it is a “global flagship store”. According to the company, in the future, more major Chinese cities will have one Huawei flagship store.
“Shenzhen is an international technology and innovation center, we believe that Huawei Global Flagship Store will become the new Connecting Hub between Huawei and customers. MixC World is a gathering place where fashion, technology, and liberal art meet together and Huawei Global Flagship Store will become Huawei’s city living room connecting the consumers.”
Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group
Huawei Global Flagship Store is a three-storey single-family building that adopts the design concept of “City Square”, which combines the traditional Chinese and western architectural philosophy. The facade adopts a large area of high transmission glass with rounded corners, feels like an exquisite Glass Enamel.
It has a unique semi-open staircase that connects the square and the surrounding environment, presenting a borderless community atmosphere whereby customers can walk into the store without any restrictions, relax and meet up with friends.
The Shenzhen store boasts full 5G coverage and is equipped with Huawei’s Intelligent Environmental Control System, which runs on the vendor’s HiLink technology to automatically adjust the brightness, temperature, and humidity within the retail site.
Huawei added that the store was built on environmentally friendly and recyclable materials. For instance, its ceilings and walls used felt made of recyclable plastic parts, while tables used nano boards that were touted to last more than 10 years.
The Chinese smartphone maker described the store as its first “direct-sale store in the world”, but it currently operates 11 “concept stores” in Singapore, from which customers can purchase its products including the Huawei Mate 30 Pro and P30 Pro.
According to the company, its products and services are available in more than 170 countries and it has 16 research and development facilities worldwide, including in India, Germany, Sweden, and the US.
On the open day of the global flagship store, there were already long queues of people who looking to purchase the Huawei Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro flagship smartphones. This is all because the launch of the new Global Flagship Store coincided with the Mate 30 series launch in China. So it’s no surprise that fans flooded the store in the hopes of getting a unit.
Huawei’s CEO, Yu Chengdong, spoke at the opening on the Huawei Mate 30 series. According to him, the Mate 30 series is already in short supply and the pre-sale volume is six times that of the P30 series. Within just three hours, pre-orders for the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro exceeded 1 million units. As always, the camera is the biggest selling point of the new Huawei models. In fact, the Mate 30 Pro has also surpassed the Galaxy Note 10+ 5G to become the highest-rated camera smartphone on DxOMark today.
Huawei has a 20 million shipment target for the Mate 30 series, and Huawei Mall announced that the sale amount for the Mate 30 series exceeded 500 million yuan ($70 million) in one minute. This just shows the popularity of the Mate 30 series, at least in China. According to Huawei officials, its latest series required a considerable amount of energy and research. About 3,000 people invested in the research and development of this series and the R&D cost exceed 2.1 billion yuan ($294 million).
Early this month at IFA 2019, Huawei unveiled a new P30 Pro that shipped with Google’s Android 10 mobile OS, despite a US trade ban that barred US companies such as Google and Microsoft from supplying technology to Huawei. Last month, Google said its license exempting it from the export restrictions still prevented it from supplying software for new products.
Despite all these, Huawei has been developing its alternative Harmony OS, which recently was described as “completely different” from Android and Apple iOS. Yu said at the company’s developer conference in Dongguan: “It is a microkernel-based, distributed OS that delivers a smooth experience across all scenarios. It has a trustworthy and secure architecture and supports seamless collaboration across devices. You can develop your apps once, then flexibly deploy them across a range of different devices.”