Huawei took the wraps off its Mate 90 phones on Thursday, leaning heavily on homegrown software and a reworked approach to chip design as a way to squeeze out better performance while US export curbs on advanced semiconductors remain in place. Speaking to reporters ahead of the launch, Huawei's consumer business chief Richard Yu acknowledged the company still faces real constraints in sourcing advanced chips.
"Advanced semiconductor capacity remains very limited in China, and Huawei's Ascend AI chips also draw on that same capacity," he said, adding that "the capacity for smartphone chips remains tight, even though rising smartphone prices have curbed shipment volumes."
With this launch, Huawei is essentially putting itself to the test, trying to prove it can keep moving its phone business forward even while its toolkit for manufacturing cutting-edge chips remains limited, a gap that has pushed the company to get creative with how it extracts more performance from the hardware it can actually produce.
A New Chip-Building Technique
The Mate 90 series succeeds last year's Mate 80 lineup, which launched in November 2025. Premium models, including the Mate 90 Pro Max, run on Huawei's Kirin 9050 Pro chip, built using a technique the company calls "LogicFolding." Instead of arranging a chip's wiring across a single flat plane the way most chips are built, this approach stacks that wiring across three dimensions, which packs more processing power into the same space and speeds things up, at the cost of needing extra wafers during manufacturing.
ALSO READ | Huawei Steps Up AI Chip Race With 11 New Chips, Takes Aim At Nvidia, Intel And AMD
Eric Xu, Huawei's rotating chairman, said at a media event in Shanghai last month that supply of the company's Ascend 950 AI chips hasn't been able to keep up with domestic demand due to capacity limits.
Yu added that China's advanced chipmaking still depends on deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography equipment, and while extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology is valuable, Chinese manufacturers are still working toward adopting it. He said Huawei plans to use more LogicFolding-based chips in future smartphones.
Huawei didn't disclose who manufactures the Kirin 9050 Pro, though Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), China's leading logic foundry, is widely believed to produce the chips used across Huawei's Mate series and its Ascend AI processors. SMIC did not respond to a request for comment.
Software, Pricing And Performance
The new phones run on HarmonyOS 7, Huawei's own Android-free operating system, which the company says now supports more than 450,000 apps and services. The Mate 90 Pro Max, in its 16GB/512GB configuration, is priced at 9,999 yuan (about $1,491), 2,000 yuan higher than the equivalent version of its predecessor at launch. The standard and Pro models start at 5,999 yuan and 6,999 yuan respectively. Huawei said the top-end Mate 90 models deliver a 31% overall performance improvement over the previous flagship generation.
Rising Component Costs Push Prices Up
Smartphone makers across China are feeling the squeeze from climbing memory and component prices, a trend that's pushing the industry both to raise prices and to lean harder into selling premium devices rather than entry-level ones. Yu said rising memory costs alone have added roughly $200 to the cost of each handset, cutting into Huawei's margins. "We have to increase prices as well, yet at a slower pace," he said.
According to IDC, China's domestic smartphone shipments fell 7% year-on-year between January and August, even as Huawei's own shipments in the country climbed 13%. The average selling price of smartphones in China rose 11.3% year-on-year in the second quarter to $543, while the average price of Huawei smartphones actually fell 14.7% to $628, per IDC data.
ALSO READ | Huawei Watch Fit 3 To Shake Up Smartwatch Market Next Week; Check Features, Variants, Pricing, More
Apple's Foldable Entry Into Huawei's Territory
Last month, Apple revealed its own first foldable device, the iPhone Duo, stepping directly into a market segment that Samsung and a handful of Chinese manufacturers, Huawei among them, have controlled for years. Yu said he welcomed the competition: "I am very pleased to see the launch of a similar product by our peers." He noted Huawei currently holds roughly a 75% share of China's foldable phone market.
"Between September 10 and 13, our Pura X Max foldable phone sales shot up 76% week-on-week right after Apple Duo's launch," Yu said, adding that the Pura X Max, a device 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, the world's largest foldable phone market, expected to account for nearly a quarter of that total, according to Counterpoint Research.
Essential Business Intelligence, Sharp Market Insights, Practical Personal Finance Advice, Daily Fuel, Gold and Silver Prices and Latest Stories — On NDTV Profit.