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SHENZHEN, China (Reuters) – Huawei Technologies, a leading player in the tech industry, officially introduced its Mate 70 smartphone series on Tuesday, representing a major milestone in its efforts to reclaim a spot in the premium smartphone market while demonstrating its commitment to software autonomy by utilizing its own operating system.
According to Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, this device is touted as “the most powerful Mate phone ever” during the launch event in Shenzhen, Huawei’s base of operations.
The Mate 70 stands out as the first mainstream smartphone to incorporate a satellite paging system, enhanced processing capabilities, and operates on Huawei’s newly developed HarmonyOS Next. Yu noted that these upgrades yield a performance increase of 40% over prior models.
This unveiling occurs amid expectations that the U.S. government may soon implement new export controls that could place an additional 200 Chinese chip manufacturers on a trade blacklist, potentially limiting their access to American suppliers, as reported by Reuters.
Historically, Huawei refrains from discussing its chip innovations during product launches, with detailed analyses typically emerging only after third-party examinations.
The Mate 70 series is pivotal as it marks the broad commercial introduction of HarmonyOS NEXT, a key component of Huawei’s strategy to achieve software independence after losing access to Google services due to U.S. sanctions in 2019.
Unlike earlier versions of HarmonyOS, which maintained some compatibility with Android, HarmonyOS NEXT – introduced to the public earlier this year – represents a definitive shift away from Android-based architecture.
Recently, Huawei announced that its HarmonyOS ecosystem now boasts over 15,000 applications, with ambitions to expand this to 100,000 in the near future.
The patriotic sentiment surrounding Huawei’s breakthroughs in technology has not only contributed to its market recovery but has also intensified competition with major rivals, including Apple, within China, recognized as the largest smartphone market worldwide.
As per Canalys research, Huawei ranked as the second-largest smartphone vendor in China during the third quarter of 2024, with shipments surpassing 10 million units for four consecutive quarters. This marks a substantial recovery from the second quarter of 2022, when shipments plummeted to 4.1 million units.
The Mate 70 series follows the Mate 60 series launched in August of last year, which was broadly viewed as a signal of Huawei’s resurgence in the high-end smartphone sector.
Teardown studies have shown that both the Mate 60 and the newly launched Pura 70 series, revealed in April, utilize advanced chips fabricated by China’s SMIC, highlighting the country’s advancing semiconductor capabilities in the face of Western-imposed export restrictions.
(Reporting by David Kirton in Shenzhen, Liam Mo in Beijing and Brenda Goh in Shanghai; Editing by Himani Sarkar)
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