Leading up to the Nexus 6P launch in September, many media outlets were reporting that the relationship between Huawei and Google was to help Huawei become better known in the US, and help Google re-enter China. Which it famously exited in 2010, due to not playing well with the Chinese government censorship laws. While half of that is true, the Nexus 6P is helping Huawei build a reputation in the US as well as exposing more people to their brand (whether that was the entire goal of building a Nexus with Google or not), Huawei made it clear today in Beijing that they were not being used as a vehicle to help Google with their re-entering of China.
We’ve heard quite a bit lately that Google has been looking to re-enter China, and Google’s Co-Founder, now Alphabet Co-Founder, Larry Page said recently that Google re-entering China is not up to him. As he is not the CEO of Google anymore, and that decision is up to Sundar Pichai. The other Google Co-Founder, Sergey Brin said something very similar a few weeks ago as well. In that Alphabet’s subsidiaries are free to do as they wish and operate in whichever countries they wish to operate in.
Huawei believes that they were chosen more for their place in the market, building high-end devices and amazing battery life, than for Google to use Huawei to re-enter the Chinese market. Huawei also specified that Google has a specific team in Mountain View that works with the Chinese government on apps and games that are specific to the Chinese market. Building on the reports that Google is looking to bring a localized version of the Play Store to China, with apps and games approved by the Chinese government.
During this interview, Huawei also mentioned that they are good at hardware and communication (meaning the radios for WiFi, LTE, etc) and Google excels at software and the ecosystem, and together they built an amazing device in the Nexus 6P with a great ecosystem thanks to the Android platform and Android 6.0 Marshmallow.