Honor launched the Magic Vs foldable smartphone globally in a bid to take on Samsung in the premium end of the handset market.
Honor
BARCELONA, Spain — Chinese smartphone maker Honor launched its foldable phone globally on Sunday, as it looks to compete with Apple and Samsung in the premium tier of the market.
The Honor Magic Vs was first launched in China in November. Now the company is bringing the device to a number of markets abroad, including the U.K., Germany and countries in Latin America.
It marks the Chinese firm’s ambition to expand into the latest smartphone technology — foldables — at the high end of the market, where it will compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung.
Honor was spun off from Huawei, after a number of U.S. sanctions cut the Chinese telecommunications giant off from critical chips and access to Google’s Android mobile operating system, crushing its smartphone business. As a separate entity, Honor has access to Android and to the components that it needs for its high-end devices.
Huawei sold Honor to a consortium of buyers that includes the government of its headquarters city, Shenzhen. Honor was the budget brand under Huawei, but has looked to market itself as a premium player since its independence, filling the gap that Huawei once did.
The company has been trying to distance itself from Huawei and establish itself independently.
“Although Honor is operating as a completely independent entity, it still has to regularly explain that is it not part of Huawei. Over time this is becoming less of an issue, but it is still a challenge it faces,” Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, told CNBC via email.
Honor Magic Vs specs
The Honor Magic Vs is a so-called foldable smartphone. These are devices that have a screen that can bend. Honor said it has tested the device by folding it and opening it up to 400,000 times with no problem.
Honor’s smartphone runs Android and has a 7.9-inch display when it is fully open. The phone also has a second display on the outside of the device when it is folded, which is 6.45 inches.
But the foldable phone category, which was pioneered by Samsung, is still in the early phases. Foldable devices accounted for only 1.1% of total smartphone shipments in 2022, according to IDC, and this share is expected to increase to just 2.8% in 2026.
The Magic Vs is one of the first foldable devices available in markets outside of China, as Honor attempts to get ahead in the nascent segment of smartphones.
High-end push
While Honor has emerged as one of the biggest smartphone players in China, it has yet to find similar success overseas. It will be hoping its more premium devices can help it win users abroad.
Honor will be hoping to wrestle back some of those users.
“I’ve been impressed by the products that Honor has unveiled and some of the DNA harking from its roots as formally being part of Huawei are clear in the quality of the products. Huawei was snapping at Samsung’s heels when it got stopped in its tracks by the U.S. administration and was setting the benchmark amongst Chinese smartphone makers,” Wood said.
“Honor now needs to assert its independence and start on the long road of establishing its brand in Western markets in a similar manner to other Chinese phone makers. This took Huawei nearly a decade, so there is a significant journey ahead for all those companies seeking to compete with Samsung and Apple.”
Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
LISBON, Portugal — British online lender Zopa is on track to double profits and increase annual revenue by more than a third this year amid bumper demand for its banking services, the company’s CEO told CNBC.
Zopa posted revenues of £222 million ($281.7 million) in 2023 and is expecting to cross the £300 million revenue milestone this year — that would mark a 35% annual jump.
The 2024 estimates are based on unaudited internal figures.
The firm also says it is on track to increase pre-tax profits twofold in 2024, after hitting £15.8 million last year.
Zopa, a regulated bank that is backed by Japanese giant SoftBank, has plans to venture into the world of current accounts next year as it looks to focus more on new products.
The company currently offers credit cards, personal loans and savings accounts that it offers through a mobile app — similar to other digital banks such as Monzo and Revolut which don’t operate physical branches.
“The business is doing really well. In 2024, we’ve hit or exceeded the plans across all metrics,” CEO Jaidev Janardana told CNBC in an interview Wednesday.
He said the strong performance is coming off the back of gradually improving sentiment in the U.K. economy, where Zopa operates exclusively.
Commenting on Britain’s macroeconomic conditions, Janardana said, “While it has been a rough few years, in terms of consumers, they have continued to feel the pain slightly less this year than last year.”
The market is “still tight,” he noted, adding that fintech offerings such as Zopa’s — which typically provide higher savings rates than high-street banks — become “more important” during such times.
“The proposition has become more relevant, and while it’s tight for customers, we have had to be much more constrained in terms of who we can lend to,” he said, adding that Zopa has still been able to grow despite that.
A big priority for the business going forward is product, Janardana said. The firm is developing a current account product which would allow users to spend and manage their money more easily, in a similar fashion to mainstream banking providers like HSBC and Barclays, as well as fintech upstarts such as Monzo.
“We believe that there is more that the consumer can have in the current account space,” Janardana said. “We expect that we will launch our current account with the general public sometime next year.”
Janardana said consumers can expect a “slick” experience from Zopa’s current account offering, including the ability to view and manage multiple account bank accounts from one interface and access to competitive savings rates.
IPO ‘not top of mind’
Zopa is one of many fintech companies that has been viewed as a potential IPO candidate. Around two years ago, the firm said that it was planning to go public, but later decided to put those plans on ice, as high interest rates battered technology stocks and the IPO market froze over in 2022.
Janardana said he doesn’t envision a public listing as an immediate priority, but noted he sees signs pointing toward a more favorable U.S. IPO market next year.
That should mean that Europe becomes more open to IPOs happening later in 2026, according to Janardana. He didn’t disclose where Zopa would end up going public.
“To be honest, it’s not the top of mind for me,” Janardana told CNBC. “I think we continue to be lucky to have supportive and long-term shareholders who support future growth as well.”
Last year, Zopa made two senior hires, appointing Peter Donlon, ex-chief technology officer at online card retailer Moonpig, as its own CTO. The firm also hired Kate Erb, a chartered accountant from KPMG, as its chief operating officer.
The company raised $300 million in a funding round led by Japanese tech investor SoftBank in 2021 and was last valued by investors at $1 billion.
Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, and Larry Aschebrook, founder and managing partner of G Squared, speak during a CNBC-moderated panel at Web Summit 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Rita Franca | Nurphoto | Getty Images
LISBON, Portugal — It’s a tough time for the venture capital industry right now as a dearth of blockbuster initial public offerings and M&A activity has sucked liquidity from the market, while buzzy artificial intelligence startups dominate attention.
At the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, two venture investors — whose portfolios include the likes of multibillion-dollar AI startups Databricks Anthropic and Groq — said things have become much more difficult as they’re unable to cash out of some of their long-term bets.
“In the U.S., when you talk about the presidential election, it’s the economy stupid. And in the VC world, it’s really all about liquidity stupid,” Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, an early-stage VC firm based in Silicon Valley, said in a CNBC-moderated panel earlier this week.
Liquidity is the holy grail for VCs, startup founders and early employees as it gives them a chance to realize gains — or, if things turn south, losses — on their investments.
When a VC makes an equity investment and the value of their stake increases, it’s only a gain on paper. But when a startup IPOs or sells to another company, their equity stake gets converted into hard cash — enabling them to make new investments.
At the same, however, there’s been a rush from investors to get into buzzy AI firms.
“What’s really crazy is in the last few years, OpenAI’s domination has really been determined by Big Techs, the Microsofts of the world,” said Yeung, referring to ChatGPT-creator OpenAI’s seismic $157 billion valuation. OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, which has made a multibillion-dollar investment in the firm.
‘The IPO market is not happening’
Larry Aschebrook, founder and managing partner at late-stage VC firm G Squared, agreed that the hunt for liquidity is getting harder — even though the likes of OpenAI are seeing blockbuster funding rounds, which he called “a bit nuts.”
“You have funds and founders and employees searching for liquidity because the IPO market is not happening. And then you have funding rounds taking place of generational types of businesses,” Aschebrook said on the panel.
As important as these deals are, Aschebrook suggested they aren’t helping investors because even more money is getting tied up in illiquid, privately owned shares. G Squared itself an early backer of Anthropic, a foundational AI model startup competing with Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Using a cooking analogy, Aschebrook suggested that venture capitalists are being starved of lucrative share sales which would lead to them realizing returns. “If you want to cook some dinner, you better sell some stock, ” he added.
Looking for opportunities beyond OpenAI
Yeung and Aschebrook both said they’re excited about opportunities beyond artificial intelligence, such as cybersecurity, enterprise software and crypto.
At Race Capital, Yeung said she sees opportunities to make money from investments in sectors including enterprise and infrastructure — not necessarily always AI.
“The key thing for us is not thinking about what’s going to happen, not necessarily in terms of exit in two or three years, we’re really, really long term,” Yeung said.
“I think for 2025, if President [Donald] Trump can make a comeback, there’s a few other industries I think that are quite interesting. For sure, crypto is definitely making a comeback already.”
At G Squared, meanwhile, cybersecurity firm Wiz is a key portfolio investment that’s seen OpenAI-levels of growth, according to Aschebrook.
Wiz is now looking to reach $1 billion of ARR in 2025, doubling from this year, Roy Reznik, the company’s co-founder and vice president of research and development, told CNBC last month.
“I think that there’s many logos … that aren’t in the press raising $5 billion in two weeks, that do well in our portfolios, that are the stars of tomorrow, today,” Aschebrook said.