ZTE has set its sights on the high-end smartphone market, announcing ambitious sales targets and a roadmap for the development of “Smart 2.0” devices and services.
The vendor will develop more and more high-end smartphones to help it pursue its goal of raising smartphone shipments from a projected 60 million this year to 80 million in 2015, ZTE executive vice-president Zeng Xuezong toldReuters.
Zheng said he believes ZTE's brand ranking in smartphones could rival those of Apple and Samsung in China, and the company is also aiming to build brand awareness internationally.
ZTE has a target of increasing its US smartphone market share from 6% in 2013 to 10% by 2017, and will increase its US marketing budget by at least 120% this year to help facilitate this. Globally, the company's marketing budget will be doubled.
ZTE's phone and tablet business accounted for around 28% of its total revenue in 2013, and the vendor expects its revenue from the segment to grow by 20% this year.
ZTE Mobile Devices CEO Adam Zeng has separately used the ZTE Global Analyst Conference to lay out its blueprint for what it calls the “Smart 2.0” age. According to Zeng, this will be an era of personalized applications and services that can be seamlessly accessed across smartphones, tablets, wearables and other connected devices.
He said growth in mobile broadband is ushering in the Smart 2.0 age, which is rapidly displacing the Smart 1.0 model that was prevalent when traditional broadband was the more common access technology.
“ZTE is committed to providing users with personalized applications seamlessly integrated with their devices to allow customers to take advantage of faster mobile connections and get the best user experience.” Zeng said.
He predicted that there will be more than 100 billion connected devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020, and that voice control will emerge as the key gateway for IoT technologies.