Take that, Apple: China’s Huawei unveils its $4200 ‘trifold’ phone

Over successive administrations, the US government has used stiff trade restrictions to try to stifle Chinese telecom giant Huawei. In turn, the company never misses an opportunity to show that it is still standing.

Last year, at the tail end of a visit to China by Gina Raimondo, the US commerce secretary, Huawei unveiled a smartphone that was powered by an advanced semiconductor made in China. The chip was exactly the kind of technology that the United States, in an effort led by Raimondo, had tried to prevent China from developing.

The Huawei phone, the Mate 60 Pro, was heralded in China as the triumph of a national champion over American constraints. It sold out within minutes on Chinese e-commerce platforms. Many shoppers chose to pair their purchase with a phone case emblazoned with a photo of Raimondo’s face.

In the Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen on Tuesday, Huawei again made a bid for the spotlight with the announcement of a new device just hours after Apple introduced its iPhone 16 in California. Huawei’s latest phone, the Mate XT, is heavy on novelty: It can be folded, twice.

The tablet-size device folds along two vertical seams to become the size of a typical phone. It is the first commercially available trifold smartphone. It comes in two colours, red and black, and will go on sale on September 20.

“It’s a piece of work that everyone has thought of but never managed to create,” said Richard Yu, Huawei’s consumer group chair. “I have always had a dream to put our tablet in my pocket, and we did it.”

The Mate XT, with a screen that measures 10.2 inches diagonally, is equipped with artificial intelligence-enabled translation, messaging and photo editing features. Yu also unveiled a thin keyboard that folds in half to the same size as the phone. He showed the audience how he carried both together in the pocket of his suit jacket.

Starting at $US2800 ($4200), the Mate XT is priced like a luxury product.

Since the Mate 60 Pro was launched last year, Huawei has been eating into Apple’s years-long dominance of the market for high-end smartphones in China.

While the trifold phone is making a splash, Huawei has not yet introduced its latest rival to the iPhone, the next-generation Mate 70.

Since the Mate 60 Pro was launched last year, Huawei has been eating into Apple’s years-long dominance of the market for high-end smartphones in China.Credit: AP

In recent years, Huawei has launched products in September, which is also when Apple typically unveils new iPhones.

Huawei has used the events to also commemorate the 2021 release of Meng Wanzhou, a top executive and the daughter of the company’s founder who had been detained in Canada after the company had been accused of violating US sanctions. Her case became a geopolitical point of contention, and her return received widespread attention in China.

Analysts said the introduction of the Mate 70 had been slowed by constraints on chip production at the country’s leading chipmaker, the state-backed Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp of China, or SMIC.

The company was behind the chips that enabled Huawei to take the world by surprise last year. But the technology used to manufacture those chips is costly and prone to defects, making it difficult to produce them in large volumes.

Huawei relies on SMIC’s most advanced technology for three of its product lines, including the new trifold phone, said Joanne Chiao, an analyst at TrendForce, a market research firm.

Huawei has not confirmed a release date for the Mate 70. SMIC did not respond to a request for comment.

Huawei was once a top global smartphone brand and maker of 5G telecommunications equipment. Its worldwide market share for smartphones plunged after the Trump administration moved in 2019 to restrict its access to critical technologies, including semiconductors. Additional sanctions by the US and its allies further eroded the company’s profits. But Huawei staged a comeback last year, reporting its fastest growth in four years, driven in part by the sales of Mate 60 Pro.

The new folding phone is Huawei’s attempt to show off its leadership despite the uncertainty around the release date of the Mate 70, according to Linda Sui, a senior director at TechInsights, a market research firm.

“Huawei still tried to do something to save face, to make people believe they feel comfortable competing with Apple side by side,” Sui said.

For a decade, China accounted for roughly 20 per cent of Apple’s total sales. It was the iPhone’s most important market after the US.

But Apple’s market share in China fell drastically during the first half of this year. Even offering iPhones at a discount — a rare step for Apple — was not enough to reverse the decline.

In the quarter that ended in June, Apple dropped out of the five top-selling brands in China, according to Canalys, a research firm. It was the first quarter in years that the bestselling smartphones in China were all made by domestic companies.

Since the Mate 60 was released, Apple has lost nearly a quarter of its market share for high-end smartphones, Sui said. That share has been taken up by Huawei.

Lori Chang, a senior analyst at Isaiah Research, a market research company, said the trifold phone was unlikely to give Huawei’s sales a big boost. The device is expensive, and because the foldable screen is hard to make, the company is expected to produce just a few hundred thousand units. Huawei launched its first foldable phone with one seam in 2019.

In Shenzhen on Tuesday, Yu said the phone’s high price reflected how challenging it was to produce. “We hope to reduce the cost by improving the process after it is launched on the market,” Yu said.

Still, as of Tuesday, more than 4 million people had signed up on Huawei’s website to be notified when the Mate XT goes on sale.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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