Huawei, already one of the biggest smartphone OEMs in China but stuttering in their efforts to gain a foothold in most of the rest of the world, seems to be serious about gunning for the pole position so firmly held onto by Samsung for years. Now, reports emanating out of Korea indicate that the human resources guys at Huawei have been on a recruitment overdrive of late and apparently, have trained their guns on the leaders themselves. A publication based out of Samsung’s home base of Korea now claims that Huawei is recruiting designers and technicians from Samsung Electronics.
Samsung’s design language and their TouchWiz UI may or may or may not be to everyone’s liking, but Huawei seems to be lapping it up. Apparently, they’ve been looking for user experience (UX) designers with a good command over the English language, as well as chip designers to work on their consumer facing hardware products, according to sources conversant with the goings-on. While the UX designers are expected to work on Huawei’s smartphone models, the hardware technicians would be responsible for developing Huawei’s in-house chips, to be used in their modems, mobile phones, processors and network equipment. It is worth mentioning here, that Huawei has partnered with Qualcomm to make the next generation mobile chipsets in an effort to compete with Samsung. Huawei is also the world’s largest telecom equipment maker by sales, and second largest after Ericsson by profit, with a bottomline of around $4.5 billion.
According to the report published on Tuesday, Huawei is offering the new recruits lucrative compensation over and above what they would have been getting at Samsung in the hope that they will help them build products for the wider audience in a concerted effort to grab a slice of the smartphone pie from outside of China. In spite of their well-documented troubles and loss of market share, Samsung still managed to hold onto their numero-uno position in the industry and shipped the most number of smartphones in the calendar year 2014, with Huawei steadily rising to No. 4, mostly on the strength of their success in the Chinese market. These reports however were not verified by either of the two companies in question.