Huawei is getting into the PC business, will announce laptop next month: report

Photo by Kārlis Dambrāns

Rumors have been swirling for years that Chinese mobile firm Huawei is interested in the PC business, but now respected Chinese newspaper Yicai is reporting that the rumors are true. Citing an anonymous internal source at the company, Yicai says that Huawei’s new PC line will be announced next month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The source says that Huawei has already lined up a partnership with Intel, so the computers will likely feature Intel processors, and they’ll probably be marketed under the “MateBook” brand, which Huawei trademarked last fall.

This news has not been confirmed by Huawei officially, but it does fall in line with some hints the company has been dropping. Aside from the trademark – which is registered to apply to computers and a variety of computer products – a Huawei spokesman last year also publicly lamented how many people were using Apple computers, implying that Huawei might be interested in snatching up some of that market. There have also been rumors floating around China’s tech scene recently that Huawei currently has headhunters looking to snatch-up world-class PC talent, but those rumors were not confirmed by Yicai’s source.

If Huawei really is interested in the PC market, its interest comes at a pretty awkward moment. Global PC sales fell across the board last year, with only Apple seeing a (very slight) sales uptick. At a time when many PC companies are moving increasingly towards mobile, it would be quite interesting if a mobile-first company like Huawei moved to get involved with PCs.