In Shenzhen, Huawei's Richard Yu offered a portrait of a company that has turned exclusion into invention — spending seven years and trillions of yuan building the chips, operating systems, and developer ecosystems it could no longer borrow from the world. The Kirin 9050 Pro and its LogicFolding architecture, alongside a HarmonyOS platform now spanning 90 million devices, represent not merely product launches but a philosophical wager: that self-reliance, sustained long enough, becomes its own form of sovereignty. The path back to global markets remains constrained by the limits of China's sem
Huawei Charts Path to Global Return With HarmonyOS, LogicFolding Chip Breakthroughs
Gradually bringing HarmonyOS to the global market in the future
Mark
So Huawei has built its own operating system and its own chips. That's a massive undertaking. How much of this is actually working at scale?
Mimi
More than 90 million devices are running HarmonyOS right now. That's real. The ecosystem has 450,000 apps. Those are concrete numbers.
Luke
But 90 million is mostly in China, right? And the source doesn't break down how many of those are phones versus tablets versus other devices. We don't know the actual smartphone base.
Mark
Fair point. What about the chips themselves? The LogicFolding technology—is that actually competitive with what Samsung or TSMC can make?
Mimi
The Kirin 9050 Pro shows 31 percent performance gains over the previous generation. It can run a 30-billion-parameter AI model on-device. That's not nothing.
Luke
But we don't have a direct comparison to competing chips. We don't know how it stacks up against Snapdragon or Apple's latest. The source only compares it to Huawei's own previous chip.
Mark
What about the global market? Yu said Huawei wants to expand HarmonyOS internationally. Is that realistic?
Mimi
He's being cautious about it—"gradually" bringing it to global markets. Wearables and tablets are already selling well outside China. That's the foothold.
Luke
But smartphones are the real test, and Huawei only sells several million units a year outside China now. That's a tiny fraction of what it used to be. The source doesn't explain what would make consumers in Europe or the U.S. switch to HarmonyOS when they're locked into iOS or Android ecosystems.
Mark
What's the actual constraint right now? Is it technology or manufacturing?
Mimi
Manufacturing. Yu said China's semiconductor capacity still can't meet demand. Memory prices are high. They're competing internally for the same limited chip supply.
Luke
Right, but that's a statement about the present moment. We don't know when or if that capacity will materialize. Yu expressed hope it would ramp up, but that's not a forecast—that's a wish.
The Pulse
- Huawei's LogicFolding chip technology delivers a 31% performance leap by stacking logic layers vertically — a workaround born of necessity that has quietly become a competitive advantage.
- The HarmonyOS ecosystem, once a defensive measure against losing Android access, now commands 90 million devices, 450,000 apps, and 11 million developers — and is being aimed at international markets for the first time.
- Semiconductor manufacturing bottlenecks inside China are throttling Huawei's ambitions, with memory prices rising and advanced chip capacity stretched thin across both smartphone and AI infrastructure needs.
- Huawei's global smartphone volumes have collapsed from industry-leading heights to just several million units annually outside China, yet the company has quietly rebuilt strength in wearables, earbuds, tablets, and rural connectivity devices.
- Richard Yu framed the supply chain ceiling as a temporary condition, staking Huawei's future on the broader maturation of China's domestic semiconductor industry — a bet that ties the company's fate to a national industrial project.
In Shenzhen, Huawei's Richard Yu offered a portrait of a company that has turned exclusion into invention — spending seven years and trillions of yuan building the chips, operating systems, and developer ecosystems it could no longer borrow from the world. The Kirin 9050 Pro and its LogicFolding architecture, alongside a HarmonyOS platform now spanning 90 million devices, represent not merely product launches but a philosophical wager: that self-reliance, sustained long enough, becomes its own form of sovereignty. The path back to global markets remains constrained by the limits of China's semiconductor supply chain, but Huawei is betting that those limits are temporary and that its own engineering depth is not.
On October 3rd in Shenzhen, Huawei's consumer business chief Richard Yu addressed international media with the measured confidence of someone who has spent years engineering around impossibility. Since U.S. sanctions severed the company's access to leading semiconductor suppliers and software platforms, Huawei has responded by building inward — pouring more than 1.8 trillion yuan into R&D over nearly two decades, accelerating to over 20 percent of annual revenue in recent years, and developing proprietary processors, modems, image sensors, and AI accelerators entirely in-house.
The clearest expression of that effort is the Kirin 9050 Pro chip, which powers the new Mate 90 smartphone series and delivers 31 percent better overall performance than its predecessor. The chip employs LogicFolding, a technique unveiled earlier this year that stacks logic layers vertically and uses high-density interconnects to shorten circuit paths and reduce latency — gains that translate directly into AI processing speed. The Mate 90 can run a 30-billion-parameter AI model entirely on-device, without cloud dependence.
HarmonyOS, Huawei's homegrown operating system developed after losing access to Android, has grown into the company's second pillar of independence. More than 90 million smartphones, PCs, and tablets now run HarmonyOS 6 or 7, supported by 450,000 apps and 11 million developers. Yu signaled that international expansion is now a genuine objective — a meaningful shift for a platform that has until now remained largely within China.
The constraints are substantial. Huawei's global smartphone volumes have fallen sharply from its former position as the world's largest maker, and China's semiconductor manufacturing capacity cannot yet meet the company's full demand. LogicFolding chips will expand to more product lines, Yu confirmed, but production remains tight — with Huawei's smartphone and AI infrastructure needs competing for the same limited advanced manufacturing capacity. Yu expressed measured optimism that China's semiconductor supply chain will scale to meet the moment, framing the current ceiling not as a permanent condition but as the unfinished chapter of a longer story.
Huawei's Richard Yu stood before an international media roundtable in Shenzhen on October 3rd with a message about survival through self-reliance. The executive, who joined the company in 1993 and now leads its consumer business, outlined how the Chinese tech giant has engineered a path back to global relevance after years of U.S. sanctions that cut it off from critical semiconductor suppliers and software ecosystems.
The foundation of Huawei's comeback rests on two technological pillars: HarmonyOS, the company's homegrown operating system, and LogicFolding, a chip architecture breakthrough that compensates for the company's inability to access the world's most advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes. Between 2007 and 2025, Huawei poured more than 1.8 trillion yuan into research and development, escalating from roughly 10 percent of annual revenue in earlier years to over 20 percent recently. That sustained investment has yielded a portfolio of proprietary components—processors, modems, image sensors, security chips, and AI accelerators—all designed entirely within Huawei's walls.
The Mate 90 series smartphones, launched with the new Kirin 9050 Pro chip, demonstrate what that investment has produced. The overall device performance is 31 percent higher than the previous generation, according to Huawei. The chip incorporates LogicFolding technology, unveiled by Huawei's semiconductor chief He Tingbo in May, which works by vertically stacking logic layers and restructuring circuit layouts through high-density interconnects between layers. The effect is shorter critical paths and reduced latency—gains that matter most in artificial intelligence processing. The Mate 90 can run a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts AI model directly on the device, without relying on cloud servers.
HarmonyOS has become the second major pillar of Huawei's independence strategy. Development began in 2019, after Huawei had been a major contributor to Google's Android ecosystem. Today, more than 90 million devices—smartphones, personal computers, and tablets—run HarmonyOS 6 or HarmonyOS 7, with Huawei expecting to cross 100 million by year-end. The ecosystem now hosts over 450,000 applications and services, supported by 11 million registered developers and more than 23,000 app innovation partners. Yu emphasized that Huawei intends to gradually bring HarmonyOS to international markets, a significant shift from its current concentration in China.
The company's global smartphone business has contracted sharply. Once the world's largest smartphone maker, Huawei now sells only several million units annually outside China. But Yu pointed to other product categories where the company has maintained or rebuilt strength. Huawei holds the number-one market share in wearables both domestically and globally. Its wireless earbuds have reached the top position in many countries. Tablets powered by HarmonyOS are performing strongly after the company lost access to Windows and Intel processors. Even mobile routers designed to bring connectivity to remote and rural areas have found significant markets outside China.
The constraints remain real. China's semiconductor manufacturing capacity still cannot meet rapidly growing demand, and memory component prices have risen sharply over the past two years, limiting smartphone sales volumes. When asked whether LogicFolding chips would appear in more phones beyond the Mate XT 2 tri-fold and the top Mate 90 models, Yu confirmed they would, but acknowledged that production capacity remains tight. Huawei has developed a requirement plan that covers both its Ascend chips for artificial intelligence infrastructure and its smartphone chip needs, competing for the same limited supply of advanced manufacturing capacity in China.
Yu framed the challenge as temporary. He expressed hope that China's semiconductor industry would ramp up production capacity, allowing Huawei to manufacture more advanced products for both the Chinese market and overseas customers. The path forward depends not only on Huawei's own engineering but on the maturation of China's entire semiconductor supply chain—a dependency that reflects how thoroughly the company has decoupled from Western technology over the past seven years.
Notable Quotes
More of our phones will definitely use these LogicFolding chips in the future.— Richard Yu, Executive Director and Chairman of Huawei's Consumer Business Group
Huawei is considering gradually bringing HarmonyOS to the global market in the future.— Richard Yu
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