Honor revealed its team based in India is pulling out. George Zhao, company CEO, revealed the brand will remain in the market but all hands-on personnel is leaving and local partners will represent the brand.
The announcement comes as Indian authorities launched a series of probes into Chinese companies, including Xiaomi, vivo, and Oppo.
George Zhao revealed the brand will adopt a “very safe approach” in its market presence. He also shared that there has been a lot of work to assemble a local team, but due to “obvious reasons”, it will be disbanded. The news comes as Honor made a strong impression with its Magic4 flagship series and the number series midrangers started picking up steam around the globe.
Honor’s decision to pull out is rather unusual, as the company hasn’t officially faced any investigations. Meanwhile, other Chinese companies faced prosecution by the Indian tax agency and finance ministry but never announced any similar measures. So far, offices of Huawei have been searched in February, $725M from Xiaomi have been seized in May, and vivo’s bank accounts have been frozen after it was found to funnel over $8 billion to parent companies to avoid paying taxes. Oppo was the latest to be caught evading custom duties with over $551 million allegedly unpaid dues.
