Early Apple creative expert joins Huawei

China's Huawei Technologies Co. has recently hired a new interface design executive who has worked at Apple Inc. and eBay Inc., the company said Thursday.

A number of Chinese tech sites had started floating a report regarding the appointment of former Apple creative director Abigail Brody as its chief user experience (UX) designer.

To show how serious the company is taking design, it seems that Huawei will be creating a United States design studio in which we can only assume is where Brody will be working from. The reports were later confirmed by Huawei in Mandarin on social media platform Weibo. "Improvement in user experience design has and will continue to be a key focus of Huawei". She also spent a decade from 2001 as Apple's creative director.

In the meantime, it is interesting to point out that Huawei already knocked Xiaomi, usually billed China's Apple, out of the top spot as the biggest smartphone maker in China during the third quarter, according to research firm Canalys.

The company has now set its sights on the global competition, including Apple's iPhone, which holds the second-largest share of the Chinese market behind Samsung. She also had a hand in branding, and helped design Apple's packaging for various iOS devices.

While the smartphone market has been dominated by Apple and Samsung, Huawei is now gaining a foothold against both of the two tech giants in the industry.

This September, Huawei released its Mate S, a 5.5-inch high-end offering ambitiously priced in the same bracket as the iPhone 6.

The company is now in the spotlight for making the recently unveiled Nexus 6P, Google's newest, hottest phablet receiving positive reviews from consumers.