Huawei Technologies unveiled its Mate 90 smartphone series on Thursday, betting on its in-house operating system and a redesigned chip architecture to boost performance in the face of US curbs on shipments of advanced semiconductors.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday ahead of the launch, Huawei consumer business chief Richard Yu said the company still faces constraints in the supply of advanced chips. “Advanced semiconductor capacity remains very limited in China, and Huawei’s Ascend AI chips also draw on that same capacity,” he said.

Premium models, including the Mate 90 Pro Max, are powered by Huawei’s Kirin 9050 Pro, a system-on-chip built with a technique Huawei calls “LogicFolding”. The method restructures a chip’s internal wiring in three dimensions rather than the conventional flat layout, allowing denser, faster processing, though it requires more wafers to produce. Yu said Huawei would use the technique in more of its future smartphones.

He said China’s advanced chip-making still relies on deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines, and that while extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology, used to make the world’s most advanced chips, is “valuable”, Chinese manufacturers are still working towards it.

Huawei did not disclose who manufactures the Kirin 9050 Pro. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), China’s top logic foundry, is widely believed to make the Kirin chips in the Mate series as well as Huawei’s Ascend AI processors. SMIC did not respond to a request for comment.

The phones run on Huawei’s Android-free HarmonyOS 7, which the company says supports more than 4509 000 apps and services. Huawei said the top-end Mate 90 models deliver a 31% increase in overall performance over the Mate 80 line, launched in November 2025.

The Mate 90 Pro Max with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage will cost C¥9 999 (R249 500), C¥29 000 more than the same version of its predecessor at launch. The standard and Pro models start at C¥59 999 and C¥69 999.

Memory squeeze

Chinese smartphone makers are grappling with rising memory and component costs, which are pushing them to raise prices and shift more shipments towards premium models. Yu said rising memory prices had added an average of US$200 to the cost of each handset, weighing on Huawei’s margins. “We have to increase prices as well, yet at a slower pace,” he said.

China’s domestic smartphone shipments fell 7% year on year between January and August, while Huawei’s rose 13%, according to International Data Corp. The average selling price of smartphones in China climbed 11.3% year on year in the second quarter to $543, while Huawei’s average price fell 14.7% to $628, IDC said.

Apple announced its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, last month, entering a category long dominated by Samsung Electronics and Chinese rivals such as Huawei, which Yu said holds about 75% of China’s foldable market.

“I am very pleased to see the launch of a similar product by our peers,” Yu said. Sales of Huawei’s Pura X Max foldable, which is similar in size to the iPhone Duo, rose 76% week on week between 10 and 13 September, straight after Apple’s launch, he said. Pura X Max shipments in China have topped 1.2 million units since its April release.

Counterpoint Research expects Apple to ship six million iPhone Duo units in 2026, with China, the world’s largest market for foldable phones, accounting for nearly a quarter of them. — Che Pan and Eduardo Baptista, (c) 2026 Reuters