"People used to know little about Huawei, but it is becoming a really big name nowadays," a shop assistant in an electronics store in downtown Helsinki said to a Xinhua reporter on Wednesday.
The salesman also mentioned a partnership agreement that Huawei signed with Finland's prominent ice hockey team, Jokerit, on Monday. He said the move was a sign that the Chinese ICT Giant was paying huge attention to individual consumers.
Having provided communication equipment and solutions globally for more than two decades, Huawei has entered the consumer products market in high profile very recently and experienced a remarkable success.
Late July Huawei was reported to become the third largest mobile producer in the world, following Apple from the United States and Samsung from South Korea.
Finnish media took up the piece of news with a focus on the fact that Huawei reached the position after surpassing Microsoft, which purchased the brand of Nokia and the whole mobile production business from the Helsinki-based company in 2013.
In the last few weeks, Huawei became the best sold tablet brand in Finland, adding to its successful story in the consumer business. In the second quarter of this year, about 30,000 Huawei tablets were sold in Finland, surpassing Samsung and Apple, a source of the company told Xinhua on Tuesday.
"The brand sold pretty well in the beginning of this year, and in the last three weeks it was continuously ranked the first place," said the source.
While Huawei's share in the Finnish tablet market reaches about 35 percent, Apple has nevertheless secured the most sales value, followed by Samsung and Huawei.
Sofia Lehtimaki, marketing director for Huawei's consumer device business, attributed the company's strong position in Finland market to the consumer oriented approach.
"Huawei is consumer centric brand and aims to respond to the consumers′ needs by introducing devices that have an existing demand in the market," she told Xinhua.
Mikko Terho, a former fellow researcher of Nokia and now working with Huawei Finland, gave two factors as the reason for Huawei's success in Finland -- "right products at right time and big change in consumer behavior."
Huawei′s approach has been "consistently offering products that the mobile operators want to sell," said Terho.
While Finnish consumers were loyal to Nokia as their main provider of mobile devices for quite a few years, things have started to change. Due to the collapse of Nokia and the stagnant progress of Apple, Huawei products emerged as an option.
"New video based social media solutions are fast gaining ground and Huawei products are well tailored for heavy social media consumption," Terho pointed out.
Kenneth Fredriksen, Huawei's Regional Vice President, said the Finns' unique taste for mobile phones could be "both challenge and asset" for Huawei.
In 2012, Huawei built up a research and development (R&D) center in Finland, and has recruited about 100 people so far. The team has contributed a lot in designing the latest Huawei handset portfolio, according to Fredriksen.
Talking about Huawei's core values of competitiveness, Terho believed in the "good form factors and design of products."
"Our own chipset Hisilicon provides always the latest standard and speed, so operators are very eager to take the product. In software we have the latest version of Android and our user interface modification and graphics EMUI are simple to use," said Terho.
