Huawei Set to Launch Its ‘Most Powerful’ Mate 70 Smartphone Soon

The Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies said that it will formally introduce its Mate 70 smartphone series this month, escalating competition with Apple and other domestic companies in the premium handset market.

In a Weibo post on Monday, Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, called the new lineup, which the company plans to introduce in November, “the most powerful Mate in history.” The post didn’t go into a great deal on the launch.

The industry is keeping a careful eye on the new smartphones’ introduction because they are the replacement for the Mate 60 series, which debuted in August 2023 and had an incredibly sophisticated chipset made entirely in China. Huawei’s declining smartphone sales were somewhat reversed by the Mate 60, which sparked patriotic fervor at home with its 7-nanometer chip manufactured by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

Huawei’s proprietary mobile operating system, HarmonyOS 5.0 (formerly HarmonyOS Next), which no longer allows Android-based apps, is expected to be installed on the Mate 70 series.

Yu’s declaration validated a previous Post article regarding the launch date of Mate 70. According to a supply chain insider who spoke to the Post earlier, Huawei is getting ready for increased sales volumes for its new premium Mate series, with component bookings up 50% from the Mate 60. More than a million Mate 70s have been prepared for the upcoming release by the Shenzhen-based company.

The introduction of the Mate 70 series will help Huawei, which briefly surpassed Apple and Samsung Electronics in global smartphone shipments before US sanctions affected the company, regain ground in the premium handset market, where competition has grown especially intense in the largest smartphone market in the world.

According to an IDC estimate released last month, Huawei’s mainland smartphone shipments increased 42% year over year to capture 15.3% of the market, trailing just Apple and market leader Vivo. With the Mate 60 and later Pura 70 series phones, the company was able to regain its position as one of the leading Chinese Android brands.

According to a report by research firm CINNO, the company’s smartphone sales on the mainland eclipsed Apple’s in August for the first time in 46 months.

According to Huawei’s report last week, the privately owned company’s sales increased by 29.5% to 585.9 billion yuan (US$82.3 billion) in the first three quarters of 2024 from 452.3 billion yuan over the same period the previous year.