Huawei rules out BlackBerry acquisition

China's Huawei will not buy another mobile phone maker, such as Blackberry, to grow its market share in smartphones, senior vice president and board member Chen Lifang said on Wednesday.

Analysts' attention has focused on the future of struggling smartphone makers Blackberry and HTC Corp after Microsoft agreed to buy Nokia's handset business on Tuesday.

Huawei was linked to Nokia in June when the head of Huawei's consumer business Richard Yu was quoted by the Financial Times newspaper as saying the company could consider an acquisition such as buying the Finnish group. Huawei played down the report, saying it had no plans to buy Nokia.

Chen Lifang said on Wednesday the group was not considering buying any handset makers.

"We haven't considered (an acquisition)," she told reporters in London. "We want to rely on ourselves."

Underlining Huawei's innovation, the company said on Wednesday it had signed an architecture licensing deal with British processor design company ARM that will enable it to design its own microprocessor cores.

The group has partnered ARM for nine years, using the Cambridge-based company's low-power technology in its telecoms gear, cloud computing and handsets businesses.

The new ARMv8 licence allows Huawei to incorporate ARM's technology in more products in areas like networking and cloud computing, the company said.

© Thomson Reuters 2013