Huawei’s ‘most powerful’ Mate 70 smartphone to launch this month

Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies said it will officially launch its Mate 70 smartphone series this month, intensifying competition in the premium handset market with other domestic brands and Apple.

Huawei will launch the new line-up in November, which Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, said in a Weibo post on Monday is “the most powerful Mate in history”. The post did not elaborate on details of the launch.

The release of the new smartphones is being closely watched by the industry, as it is the successor of last year’s Mate 60 series, which launched in August 2023 with a surprisingly advanced processor completely produced in China. With its 7-nanometre chip made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), the Mate 60 ignited patriotic fervour at home, helping reverse Huawei’s flagging smartphone sales.

The Mate 70 series is expected to be equipped with HarmonyOS 5.0, previously known as HarmonyOS Next, Huawei’s home-grown mobile operating system that no longer supports Android-based apps.

Yu’s announcement confirmed an earlier report by the Post on Mate 70’s launch date. Huawei is preparing for higher sales volumes for its new premium Mate series, with component bookings up by 50 per cent compared with those of the Mate 60, a supply chain source previously told the Post. The Shenzhen-based firm has readied more than 1 million units of the Mate 70 for the coming release.

The launch of the Mate 70 series will further boost Huawei, which briefly overtook Samsung Electronics and Apple in global smartphone shipments before being impacted by US sanctions, in its pursuit to reclaim lost ground in the premium handset segment, where competition has become particularly fierce in the world’s biggest smartphone market.