Handset manufacturer Honor signed a long-term deal with tech giant Tencent to work together across a number of areas including AI and cloud service development.

In a translated post from Tencent’s Chinese language Weixin social media platform, it explained the pair’s strategic cooperation involved combining Honor’s capabilities in terminals, AI and “ecosystem construction” with its cloud and content abilities.

It noted the pair would “complement each other’s advantages and grow together”.

The two China-based players already collaborate in a number of areas, with Tencent supplying various services to the handset manufacturer. These include tools to optimise applications and expand data capacity to respond to peaks in demand.

Honor and Tencent have also collaborated on a coding assistant for developers to aid creation and debugging.

The latter noted more than 8,000 Honor software engineers have used AI-assisted programming, which increase code generation rate and the adoption rate during the development process.

Moving forward the two plan to further adapt this to drive further developer benefits.