Huawei launches tri-fold Mate XT smartphone, challenging Apple in China

Huawei announced its Mate XT smartphone on a Tuesday in September, timing the reveal to land just hours after Apple had finished presenting the iPhone 16 to the world. The move was deliberate—a statement of presence in a market where the two companies are locked in an intensifying struggle for dominance. What Huawei was unveiling was not merely another phone. The company claimed it had built the world's first tri-fold smartphone, a device that could fold three times over, collapsing down to a size that fit in a pocket before expanding to a 10.2-inch screen. Richard Yu, who leads Huawei's consumer business, said the engineering had consumed five years. The breakthrough, he explained at the livestreamed event, lay in the screen and hinge technology—specifically, the ability to fold outward without the gaps that plagued earlier designs, and to fold inward with the same seamlessness.

The phone was available in red and black. The base model cost 19,999 yuan, roughly $2,800. Within days of going online for pre-orders on Saturday, it had accumulated more than 3.7 million reservations. For a company that had been written off not long ago, the number signaled something significant: Huawei was not merely surviving the American sanctions that had nearly destroyed it. It was accelerating.

The timing of the two launches—Huawei's and Apple's—was not accidental. It marked what analysts described as the opening of a new competitive phase in China's premium smartphone market. Amber Liu, a research manager at Canalys, told reporters that Huawei's resurgence directly challenged Apple's grip on the country, which accounted for more than one-fifth of Apple's global shipments. The numbers bore this out. For the first time ever, Chinese smartphone makers had claimed the top five positions in a quarterly ranking of domestic sales. Apple had fallen to sixth place. The competition would now center on three fronts: high-end hardware, software capabilities, and artificial intelligence deployment.

Apple's answer to that last point was built into the iPhone 16. The company had designed the phone specifically to run generative AI features—tools that would let users create text and images by typing natural-language prompts, much like ChatGPT. Whether the Mate XT included comparable AI capabilities remained unclear. Jene Park, an analyst at Counterpoint Research who studies foldable phones, noted that Huawei seemed focused on two things: a larger display and longer battery life. The 10.2-inch screen represented a significant jump from the typical 7 to 8 inches found in other book-style foldables. That alone could reshape the category.

Yet analysts cautioned that pre-orders did not always translate to sales. Liu believed actual purchases would fall short of the 3.7 million reservations, citing concerns about pricing and how widely the phone would be available. The question of whether Huawei could sustain this momentum remained open. What was not open to debate was the company's trajectory. In the first five months of 2024, sales of Huawei's flagship phones had jumped 72 percent compared to the same period the year before. In August, the company reported double-digit increases in both revenue and profit, all while operating under American sanctions that had been designed to cripple it.

Those sanctions had been severe. The U.S. government had barred companies like Google from supplying Huawei with Android, the operating system that powers most of the world's smartphones. At the time, some analysts had predicted Huawei phones would become unusable bricks. Instead, the company had engineered its way around the restrictions, and was now expanding into new territories. Last year it had launched an electric sedan to compete with Tesla. It was building ambitions in artificial intelligence. Nvidia, the chip giant, had named Huawei a top competitor in the production of processors that power AI systems. The American government had long claimed Huawei posed a national security threat, alleging the Chinese state could use its equipment for espionage. Huawei had denied this repeatedly. Some American allies, including the United Kingdom, had nonetheless restricted Huawei's role in building 5G networks. None of it had stopped the company's return. The Mate XT, with its 3.7 million pre-orders and its tri-fold screen, was the latest evidence that Huawei had not merely survived. It was competing again.