Chinese technology firm Honor will launch a foldable flip phone this year, CEO George Zhao told CNBC at Mobile World Congress 2024. It marks the company’s first foray into the vertical-folding style of smartphone that has been popularized by brands like Samsung and Motorola.
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BARCELONA — Honor will launch a foldable flip phone this year, the company’s CEO told CNBC, marking the Chinese technology firm’s first foray into the vertical-folding style of smartphone that has been popularized by brands like Samsung and Motorola.
“Foldables” refer to smartphones with displays that bend. There are two styles right now on the market — smartphones that fold like a book and those that fold vertically like an old school flip phone but without a visible hinge.
The move to launch a flip foldable is in line with Honor’s push into the premium end of the market where it’s looking to challenge companies like Samsung and Apple.
“This year we are preparing for the flip phone launch — now that we are internally in the final stage,” George Zhao, CEO of Honor, told CNBC in an exclusive interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
“We are very positive about foldables for the future.”
Honor already has a number of foldable phones on the market. The latest one is the Honor Magic V2 that it launched last year. But all of Honor’s current foldables are the book style of the folding device.
Honor already has a number of smartphones on the market that fold like a book, such as the Magic V2 that was launched in July 2023 shown here. The Chinese tech company is now preparing to launch a vertical-folding style smartphone, its CEO George Zhao told CNBC at the Mobile World Congress.
Honor
The entry into flip foldables will expose Honor to a different price point. The flip style of phones, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 5 are often priced cheaper than the horizontal-style folding devices.
Foldables are seen as high-end devices in the world of smartphones. Sales for premium smartphones, those over $600, likely grew in 2023 while the overall market declined, according to Counterpoint Research. This is one reason that Honor is targeting the high-end market.
Sales of foldable phones are set to rise 40% year-on-year to 22 million units in 2024, according to Counterpoint Research. But Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, said demand for the flip foldable may be slowing because “expectations of aggressive pricing of the flip form factor has been difficult.”
“I believe this will create some market gap for newer vendors to enter or expand in the flip segment and test out the market.”
Zhao said his hope in the next three-to-five years is that sales volumes overseas exceed China.
Honor’s AI push
Like most device makers at MWC, Honor touted the potential of AI.
For Zhao, the value of the technology will come when a device is able to anticipate what you’d like to do next.
For example, you may get a message from a friend to meet for dinner and the device will be able to anticipate whether you want to open the name of the restaurant in a mapping app or reply to the message.
“In the future, Honor’s strategy is AI to reconstruct the user interaction. It will be intent-based, the user interaction. So maybe when you interact with your phone, it can understand what is your requirement,” Zhao said.
The company also showed off a demonstration of a chatbot built on Meta’s Llama 2 AI model.
Last year, Honor announced its intention to go public. Zhao said preparations are being made for the initial public offering but there is no final timing or destination for the listing.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
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Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.
Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.
This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.
Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.
The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.
In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all.
In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.
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Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.
Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.
OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.
“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”
Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.
Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.
“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”
Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.
The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024.
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The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.
A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.
“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.
X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.
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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.
Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.
Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”
xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.
Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.