You can't accuse the Chinese telco giant of lacking ambition.
Huawei formally launched its new drive into Europe and the world at a glitzy event in Central London this evening.
It revealed its first high-end devices – the Vision smartphone and the Mediapad tablet – and confirmed the creation of a dedicated design facility based in London.
These moves will act as a springboard, it said, for growth that will see it grab four per cent of the UK smartphone market by Q4 2012.
But more than that, Huawei is confident enough to believe it can become a top five handset market by in three years, and a top three player in five.
It certainly has the resources to do it – Huawei earns $30bn a year from its combination of network infrastructure and hardware products, and has close relationships with operators all over the world.
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But it faces extreme competition, not just from incumbent market leaders but from other hungry newcomers such as ZTE and Micromax.
The firm has been moving quietly from a white-label B2B strategy in handsets to an own-brand B2C approach, launching the Blaze handset this summer.
Its new smartphone Huawei Vision runs Android Gingerbread, has a 3.7-inch screen and single core 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.
It also comprises a 3D user interface that's been licensed from the Russian firm SPB. The Vision will be out in December 2011, from £25 a month.
Then there's the seven inch Huawei Mediapad tablet, originally launched in the US in June. It runs Android 3.2 Honeycomb and houses a 1.2GHz dual-core processor from Qualcomm.
The UK price is set from £275 plus VAT.
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