Huawei Debuts Mate 90 With Homegrown Chip Tech as US Curbs Persist

Huawei unveiled its Mate 90 smartphone lineup on Thursday, and the company's strategy was written into every technical choice: work with what you can actually make, and make it work harder. The Mate 90 Pro Max, the flagship model, starts at 9,999 yuan—roughly $1,491—and sits atop a series built around the Kirin 9050 Pro chip, which uses a manufacturing technique Huawei calls LogicFolding. This is not a minor engineering detail. It is the company's answer to a real problem that has no easy solution.

For years, US export controls have restricted China's access to the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Huawei cannot simply buy the latest chips from the most cutting-edge foundries. So the company has had to get creative. Instead of arranging a chip's circuitry across a single flat plane—the standard approach—LogicFolding stacks that wiring vertically across three dimensions. The result is more processing power packed into the same physical space, and faster performance. The tradeoff is that it requires extra wafers during manufacturing, which adds cost. But it works. Huawei said the top-end Mate 90 models deliver a 31 percent overall performance improvement over the previous generation.

Richard Yu, Huawei's consumer business chief, was direct about the constraints the company still faces. "Advanced semiconductor capacity remains very limited in China, and Huawei's Ascend AI chips also draw on that same capacity," he told reporters. The company is competing for the same limited pool of advanced chip manufacturing resources that its own AI division needs. Smartphone chip capacity, he said, remains tight. This is not abstract corporate speak—it is a description of genuine scarcity. China's advanced chipmaking still depends on deep ultraviolet lithography equipment. Extreme ultraviolet technology, which would unlock even more advanced production, remains out of reach for Chinese manufacturers, who are still working toward adopting it. Huawei plans to use more LogicFolding-based chips in future phones, which suggests the company expects these constraints to persist.

The new phones run on HarmonyOS 7, Huawei's own operating system built without Android, which the company says now supports more than 450,000 apps and services. But the real story is in the pricing. The Mate 90 Pro Max in its 16GB/512GB configuration costs 2,000 yuan more than the equivalent model of its predecessor cost at launch. The standard Mate 90 starts at 5,999 yuan; the Pro model at 6,999 yuan. Rising memory and component costs are the culprit. Yu said memory costs alone have added roughly $200 to the cost of each handset, squeezing margins across the industry. "We have to increase prices as well, yet at a slower pace," he said. Huawei is raising prices, but not as fast as its costs are rising, a calculation that reflects both the competitive pressure it faces and the limits of what consumers will bear.

The broader market context sharpens the picture. Between January and August of this year, China's domestic smartphone shipments fell 7 percent year-on-year. Huawei, though, grew 13 percent in the same period—it is taking share in a shrinking market. The average selling price of smartphones in China rose 11.3 percent year-on-year in the second quarter to $543. Huawei's average phone price actually fell 14.7 percent to $628, which means the company is selling more expensive phones but fewer of them, and the average is still coming down. Chinese smartphone makers across the board are feeling the squeeze from climbing component costs, pushing the entire industry toward premium devices and away from entry-level models.

One more factor has entered the equation: Apple. Last month, Apple unveiled its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, stepping directly into a market segment that Samsung and a handful of Chinese manufacturers—Huawei chief among them—have owned for years. Huawei currently holds roughly 75 percent of China's foldable phone market. Yu said he welcomed the competition, and the numbers suggest why. Between September 10 and 13, right after Apple's Duo launch, Huawei's Pura X Max foldable phone sales jumped 76 percent week-on-week. The Pura X Max, which is similar in size to the iPhone Duo, has sold more than 1.2 million units in China since its April release. Apple is projected to ship 6 million iPhone Duo units in 2026, with China expected to account for nearly a quarter of that total. The foldable market is about to get crowded, and Huawei's dominance is about to be tested in ways it has not been before.