For the first time in 46 months, Huawei’s smartphone sales in China during a single month, August, topped sales of the iPhone in the country. The report from CINNO Research shows that Huawei continues to have momentum in the world’s largest smartphone market after shocking Chinese consumers and U.S. lawmakers last year with the unveiling of the Mate 60 series. Blocked from obtaining chipsets that support 5G by U.S. sanctions, Huawei surprised everyone by packing the Mate 60 flagship line with its own Kirin 9000s 5G processor.
It was the first time since 2020’s Mate 40 series that Huawei was able to use a 5G supporting chipset to power its own phone. The Kirin 9000s was built by China’s leading foundry, SMIC, using its 7nm node making it one and two generations behind the 3nm and 4nm chips used on flagship models in 2023 and 2024. But there are rumors that the Mate 70 line, due out later this year, will feature a 5nm Kirin 9100 processor that will be built by SMIC. The foundry will reportedly use a complicated multiple patterning technique to mark up silicon wafers with circuitry patterns.
During August, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a government think tank, said that foreign smartphone shipments in China, which include the iPhone, declined 12.7% year-over-year from 2.14 million units in August 2023 to 1.87 million units during August 2024. During the same time, domestic smartphone shipments hit 24.05 million which was a 26.7% increase on an annual basis.
The tri-folding Huawei Mate XT. | Image credit-Huawei
Despite being handcuffed by U.S. sanctions, Huawei has still been able to generate strong sales of its flagship models in China. These phones include the Mate 60 line released last summer, and the Pura 70 photography-based series which launched earlier this year. Recently Huawei made big news when it introduced the first tri-folding handset, the Mate XT.
Huawei leads the Chinese smartphone market with its 17.5% share halfway through 2024. According to IDC, during the second quarter, Apple was no longer one of the top five smartphone manufacturers in China with a market share of under 14%. One of the issues affecting the new iPhone 16 series in China is that Apple’s AI initiative, Apple Intelligence, won’t be available in Chinese until next year. And to top it off, AI is heavily regulated by the Chinese government.
But this isn’t really about any mistakes that Apple has made or problems that it has in China. It’s more about Huawei’s ability to turn lemons into lemonade which is something that the company has been able to do ever since it was called out by the U.S. for being a national security threat. Remember, the U.S. started issuing sanctions just as Huawei was about to pass Samsung to become the top smartphone manufacturer in the world.