When two brands find themselves in trouble, a great solution can be to start rowing together with each other. That is what Huawei and the former BQ managers must have thought; Once a famous Spanish mobile brand that will now come back to life thanks to the Chinese manufacturer.
Until now, the firm belonged to the conglomerate Vingroup, the largest company in Vietnam. Let us remember that, at the end of 2018, the group acquired 51% of BQ’s shares and, therefore, the decisions to be made. Since that day their mobiles began to be sold under the Vsmart brand but it is a firm that has never gotten off the ground.
In fact, this same year the VSmart mobile division definitively closed its doors, taking the old Spanish smartphones into oblivion, joining the LG phones. And, when we thought we would never hear from them again, Huawei has arrived.
The brand’s new strategy
To understand this movement we simply have to look at the sales data of the Chinese brand. During the first half of 2021, the brand itself declared a decrease in sales of between 25 and 30%, which is equivalent to not entering an amount close to 35,500 million dollars. This represents a decline in the market of almost 50%.
To alleviate this problem, the brand already took a first step just a few months ago, when it sold its HONOR brand to a Chinese consortium of more than thirty companies and investment firms. In addition to saving the brand’s terminals, as we have seen with the launch of the Honor 50, this has allowed “Huawei” mobiles to once again have Google services and a licensed version of Android.
A second life for BQ… and Huawei?
Now the thing is not about sales, but about purchases. The agreement does not speak of BQ’s mobiles as such coming back to life, but rather that the firm, the brand, has been acquired. We have not been provided with data about the transaction, but different media assured last week that the agreement would be closed for a figure close to 70 million yuan , about 10 million euros, not bad for a defunct brand.
In this way, Huawei will be able to sell its mobiles under the name of BQ but being entirely manufactured by them. This would bypass the US blockade once again and could market many of the phones in its catalog in Spain, of course with Android 12 as the operating system. Here a doubt assails us because, like Honor smartphones work with a version of EMUI, called Magic UI, it is to be imagined that the new smartphones have a similar operating system, but more details have not yet been given about it.
Now we only have to wait until the middle of next year to know how these new smartphones born from the association of Huawei and the Spanish firm will be. The last of the manufacturer that came to be seen in stores were the VSmart: Active 1 / 1+ and Joy 1 / 1+ while from BQ we all have the X2 and X2 Pro in memory.
Will it be now when we can finally see a BQ Aquaris X3 ?
