Honor CEO Li Jian, from breakthroughs in imaging to the implementation of AI, from flagship pricing to open collaboration, is attempting to solve not just the question of "making a good phone," but how to turn technological investment into user choice, and then let user choice support long-term innovation. In the media group interview following the launch of the Honor Magic9 series, Honor CEO Li Jian did not rush to explain this flagship with specifications, but first raised a more fundamental question: What kind of company does Honor want to become? "The world does not lack a traditional phone manufacturer, a traditional phone assembly plant," he said. What is truly scarce is a high-tech company with the ability to lead through innovation. This statement also serves as the entry point for understanding this group interview.
In the exchange on September 28, Li Jian, along with Product Line President Fang Fei, Hardware Engineering Department President Liu Yang, and AI & Software Business Department President Sun Jianfa, discussed the product positioning, imaging investment, AI collaboration, and pricing strategy of the Magic9. They talked about technological breakthroughs and also about past dissatisfaction; they emphasized user value while also acknowledging the real constraints of cost pressure and operational foundations. Compared to the concentrated display of product capabilities at the launch event, this exchange more clearly revealed Honor's current situation: it needs a flagship to prove its R&D capabilities, and it also needs this flagship to actually sell, proving that innovation can translate into commercial results. The Magic9 carries exactly these two tasks.
Beyond Being Just an "All-Rounder": A Flagship Needs a Reason to Be Chosen
Fang Fei was direct during the group interview: "By the time our Magic8 came out last year, we actually weren't that satisfied with the results." She did not elaborate on specific operating data, but this candor was enough to show that the new flagship's task was not to continue iterating along the existing path. In the past, a flagship could prove it had no obvious shortcomings through balanced specifications. Fang Fei summarized the previous approach as an "all-rounder warrior," while the Magic9 hopes to be different: it needs to answer not only "is it good enough in every aspect," but also "why should users choose it." Honor's answer is "born for creators." In Li Jian's explanation, this is not simply adding a marketing label to imaging, but using a clear target audience to reorganize product capabilities: imaging helps users express themselves, AI reduces operational burden, and capabilities such as the screen, battery life, and audio support the creative process. In other words, Honor is attempting to shift the competitive logic of the flagship from a collection of specifications to an integration of scenarios.
When Liu Yang discussed the screen's low-reflection design, he explained it in the context of outdoor shooting. He stated that the relevant screen reflectivity is 1.5%, aimed at addressing creators' needs to view images in high-brightness, high-reflection environments. The battery was also given a similar scenario-based meaning. Fang Fei revealed that the Magic9 Pro Max is equipped with an 8800mAh battery, but achieving this capacity required repeated trade-offs between feel, weight, and thickness. The importance of this information is not just the specifications themselves, but that the specifications begin to serve the same product narrative: making it easier for users to complete creative work. However, "creator" may also become an overly broad concept. Professional video workers and ordinary users who record daily life have different requirements for devices. Honor must provide professional capabilities while avoiding making professionalism a barrier to use. Liu Yang's answer reflected this dual consideration: ordinary users can use the ARRI Master Mode to obtain images that are easier to share, while professional users can use log footage and post-production workflows. This means that what the Magic9 truly needs to prove is not whether it can serve a small number of professionals, but whether it can translate professional capabilities into an experience that most people can perceive.
Collaborating with ARRI: Honor Wants More Than Just a Logo
Throughout the entire exchange, ARRI was mentioned frequently. But more noteworthy than the partner brand itself is how Honor describes the changes brought by the collaboration. "Without the collaboration with ARRI, objectively speaking, our imaging progress would not have been so fast," Li Jian said. Liu Yang further pointed out that the collaboration reshaped the team's understanding of video. According to his introduction, the collaboration involved LogC3 curve adaptation, AWG3 color space, video formats, and post-production workflow integration. What Honor hopes to introduce is not just a visually recognizable color style, but a way of working from shooting to post-production. This also explains why Honor repeatedly emphasizes "workflow." For professional creation, shooting is not the endpoint. Whether footage can enter post-production software, whether consistency can be maintained between different stages, and whether creators have enough room for adjustment all affect the actual value of the device. Liu Yang mentioned that Honor hopes to connect professional creative workflows through collaboration, interfacing with post-production software such as DaVinci. If these capabilities can be reliably implemented, the phone's role will no longer be just a casual recording tool, but may become a shooting endpoint in professional production workflows.
At the same time, Honor is also trying to change the starting point for evaluating imaging. Liu Yang believes that "realism is only the foundation." Beyond that, imaging must also serve to record life and express emotion. He talked about skin tone, skin texture, light and shadow transitions, and reducing over-sharpening, emphasizing that the image should not just be a stack of details and specifications. This does not mean specifications are no longer important, but that Honor hopes to extend competition beyond specifications: from "shooting clearly" to "how to express." However, judgment of this change still needs boundaries. Management's evaluation of image quality and aesthetics is the company's own interpretation of its products and cannot be directly equated with independent test conclusions. Whether Honor can form a stable imaging style ultimately depends on users' actual work in different scenarios, not just launch event samples. Faced with comparisons to Apple, Li Jian also did not directly declare victory by following the question, but emphasized "doing your own thing well." More critical than short-term benchmarking is whether investment can continue. Li Jian clearly stated that Honor will firmly invest in imaging R&D and listed imaging, AI, and design as key development directions for the phone business. Therefore, the true value of the ARRI collaboration for Honor should not be measured only by how much attention the new product receives, but by whether it can translate into technical understanding, aesthetic judgment, and product capabilities that the team retains over the long term.
AI Must Not Only Demonstrate, but Also Complete Tasks for Users
If imaging solves the problem of expression, AI solves another type of need: whether users can operate less and let the system complete more. Sun Jianfa did not begin explaining AI's value from model names, but instead proposed several direct criteria: whether it solves problems users frequently encounter, whether it can complete tasks in real scenarios, and whether it is simple and easy to use. This set of standards actually shifts the focus of AI evaluation from "what it can do" to "whether it can reliably finish the job." He took YOYO scheduling as an example: schedule information is scattered across different apps and pages, manual organization is troublesome, and omissions may delay matters. The system's value lies in recognizing this information, recording schedules, and reminding users at the appropriate time. The same applies to the package pickup code feature. Honor emphasizes the visual presentation of product categories and keyword prompts, not to let users see more complex AI capabilities, but to let users understand information at a glance. These features are not all dramatically technical, but they are closer to daily use. For system-level AI, what truly affects retention is often not a single amazing demonstration, but whether it saves effort when used repeatedly.
Supporting this direction is Honor's collaboration with Alibaba. Sun Jianfa revealed that before the collaboration, Honor's planning and execution large model used a 14B-scale open-source model; after the collaboration, the two sides built a 397B-scale model. He also stated that the system can execute tasks of more than a hundred steps, and the user task accurate closed-loop rate of MagicOS11 reached 91.8%. These figures illustrate the direction of Honor's investment in upgrading AI capabilities, but they cannot directly replace actual experience judgment. A larger model does not automatically mean all tasks can be completed more reliably; a longer task chain also places higher demands on exception handling, permission management, and result confirmation. Especially as AI moves from providing suggestions to executing on behalf of users, reliability is no longer just an experience issue, but also relates to whether users are willing to hand over operational control. This group interview did not fully explain the relevant mechanisms. What is worth continued observation in the future is precisely those details that are not easy to show in demonstrations: how to recover after a task fails, how to confirm before executing critical operations, and how users can understand and control the system's behavior. From this perspective, the "task closed loop" proposed by Honor is both a product selling point and a stricter self-requirement.
Price Is Not a Secondary Issue, but the Key to Whether Innovation Can Form a Cycle
Throughout the group interview, the discussion that best reflected the intersection of technological ideals and business reality was pricing. Li Jian acknowledged cost pressure and also emphasized that Honor does not have a sufficiently affluent foundation. His statement was that the pressure of rising costs cannot be fully passed on to users, and instead the company must tap internal potential, reduce costs, and improve efficiency to absorb difficulties as much as possible. But he also acknowledged, "If we make no adjustments at all, we cannot do it either." This means Honor's pricing choice cannot be simply understood as sacrificing margins at any cost. More accurately, it is seeking a balance between product adoption and operational affordability. In Li Jian's view, no matter how good a product is, if no one uses it, its technological value is difficult to truly realize. He called this pricing an investment on the user side and said the company will continue to invest in services, sales, and marketing. Behind this is a clear business logic: only when more users use the product can real works and word of mouth accumulate; word of mouth can influence subsequent purchases, and a broader user base can in turn support continuous R&D.
But this cycle will not automatically hold just because the price is attractive. It still depends on product experience, service capabilities, and cost efficiency working together. Fang Fei added a manufacturing detail: the gap of the phone's parallel dual-slot antenna is 0.4 millimeters, and achieving this design faces yield and cost challenges. Such details hint at another side: when a product pursues more complex craftsmanship, stronger imaging, and a larger battery, the company must pay real costs for these choices. A pricing strategy can help innovation get closer to users, but it also requires the organization to have stronger efficiency and supply chain capabilities. At the group interview, Li Jian disclosed that within half an hour of the Magic9 series going on sale, e-commerce platform-wide sales increased by 194% year-on-year compared with the previous flagship series. This data is a positive opening signal, although it is not yet enough to prove that the long-term competitive landscape has changed, change has already occurred. What Honor needs to prove next is whether this growth can continue, rather than only holding true at launch.
After Open Collaboration, What Will Honor Rely On to Build Its Own Capabilities?
The collaborations with ARRI and Alibaba also point to a deeper question: when important capabilities come from partnerships, where exactly does Honor's own competitiveness lie? Li Jian's answer is to explore to the extreme internally and break boundaries externally. In his description, innovation should not be completed by one company alone. Internally, it requires talent, mechanisms, and culture; externally, it requires partners with real capabilities. Honor acknowledges the help collaboration has provided to product progress and is also trying to make openness part of its innovation approach. However, there is no natural equals sign between open collaboration and forming differentiation. The key is whether Honor can translate partner capabilities into its own understanding of end-user scenarios, and then integrate them into products through hardware, operating systems, and interaction design. Otherwise, collaboration can easily remain at the level of stacking features; only if this integration capability persists can external resources become a long-term advantage. When Fang Fei spoke about the collaboration with Alibaba, what she emphasized was precisely model and device adaptation, operating system capabilities, and perception of consumer scenarios. Sun Jianfa frankly stated that both sides had faced collaboration difficulties caused by differences in processes, culture, and even terminology. These statements reveal the work beyond the launch event: innovation does not always appear as a new feature; sometimes it is different organizations finally being able to operate collaboratively around the same user problem.
Li Jian also extended the future of Magic to computers, tablets, wearables, and more smart devices. What he envisions is an ecosystem in which devices can connect seamlessly and jointly serve people. But this remains a vision at present and cannot be confused with already realized product capabilities. Compared with the broad narrative of the future, the Magic9 carries a more specific near-term test: whether Honor can, on the main track of flagship bar phones, create a product that has distinct characteristics and is accepted by enough users. Fang Fei said she hopes to "truly reflect it through sales." This blunt statement does not contradict Li Jian's expectation for an innovative company. Because for Honor, technological breakthroughs and commercial results must support each other. Without differentiated capabilities, sales can easily fall into price competition; without enough user choice, technological ideals will also struggle to obtain sustained investment. After the Magic9, what Honor truly needs to answer may not be whether it has become a follower or surpasser of some competitor, but whether it can establish a sustainable path: continuously making different products, helping users understand that difference, and making them willing to stay for it. This is harder than winning or losing at a launch event, and it will more decisively determine what kind of company Honor ultimately becomes.
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