Huawei has launched an e-commerce store that would sell all its products available in South Africa directly to the public. The Chief Technology Officer, Akhram Mohamed, revealed their official South African online store at the company’s P30 series launch event. This means that its phones, tablets, laptops, accessories, and watches will be available in the online store. Promotions and unique offers will be exclusively available online and they will be aimed at giving customers more options to find and purchase Huawei products in the country.
Mohamed noted that this e-commerce platform would not be operated directly by Huawei South Africa. The store will be owned and managed by Mustek Limited and they are licensed to sell and distribute Huawei products. Any order over R500 will be delivered free of charge, anywhere in the country and payments would be made through its Paygate payment options. Huawei will be the one to handle after-sales support and customer queries and returns.
The new products launched include the P30 series, FreeLace, FreeBuds, and Mini Bluetooth Speaker, GT Watch, M5 Lite tablet, and the Matebook 13. The P30 Pro costs R19000, P30 costs R14000, and P30 Lite costs R6000. Most of the newly announced products are already available for purchase from the online store.
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Huawei explained that the e-commerce store would not affect its sales in other online stores like Takealot, it still plans to keep doing promotions with other retailers in South Africa. Mohamed noted that this is the recommended retail pricing for the devices and that most retailers should offer the devices in line with the official prices.
Speaking at the recent international launch of the new smartphones, CEO Richard Yu said that South Africa was a key market for the Chinese smartphone manufacturer. “The South African market is very important for Huawei and we have seen strong growth in South Africa, especially in the middle-to-high tier,” Yu said.
Huawei has also opened a dedicated warehouse for the local market as well as a local branch of the Huawei Cloud platform for enterprise customers. These infrastructure deployments will increase customer support, software functionality, and better launch windows for mainstream products. Huawei Pay will be coming to South Africa by the middle of 2019, offering a competitive payment platform.