Huawei tri-fold device launch plan oozes bravado

• The US’s efforts to bury Huawei haven’t turned out as planned
• If anything, the Chinese giant has been energised to fight for its survival
• And, with China’s huge telecom market at its back, may eventually attain the global dominance so feared in 2019

Despite, or perhaps because of, attempts by the US government to kneecap Huawei in the global telecom market by withholding access to advanced US technology, the Chinese giant now appears to be confident it can spring back to rude health and eventually bring its own advanced technology with it.

Next week it’s planning a two-fingered salute for rival Apple and the adversarial US government by scheduling the launch of its new and, it seems, quite eagerly awaited tri-fold smartphone only hours after Apple’s iPhone 16 launch event on 9 September: The Huawei launch is on 10 September and, due to time zone differences, will take place only hours after the Apple product unveiling.  

Not only is Huawei confidently unfolding some genuine innovation, but it will add insult to attempted injury by launching a smartphone product with a larger screen size than the Apple device and one that will likely be based on home-grown chipsets. If the launch pans out as Huawei hopes, the device could even be characterised as the iPad you can slip into your pocket. Depending on how slick, cheap and imminent the tri-fold turns out to be, it may be a game changer, but at the very least it will successfully take some of the spotlight off the iPhone 16.

This jab in Apple’s eye comes against a background of improving Huawei financials. After a few years in the fiscal doldrums following the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, US sanctions and other restrictions on its international trade, Huawei is now making steady progress. Revenues for the first six months of this year were up by 34% to 417.5bn yuan (US$58.6bn). And it has posted a healthy net profit margin of 13.2%, putting many of its telecom technology rivals in the shade.

But Huawei’s rotating chairman, Eric Xu, wasn’t letting the financial triumph go to his head. “Our overall performance was in line with forecasts,” he flatly understated.

Humble words, but Huawei appears to be bubbling with confidence and keen to garner some schadenfreude. When the US sanctions started to affect Huawei’s business during the previous decade, the Chinese vendor was just starting to have some real success with its Android-based smartphones (one reason, critics alleged, for the US attempt to muscle the company out of the market). 

Then Google was instructed not to provide Huawei access to the Playstore and its core apps (Gmail, YouTube, Maps etc), and sales promptly tanked.

But Huawei just quietly set about a Long March, developing its own operating system and workarounds to rebuild its potential in the devices market – as the cheeky launch of a tri-fold next week may show – and meanwhile it has managed to maintain a prominent position in the 5G network infrastructure market, where it was widely acknowledged to be the leading contributor to that ecosystem.

That may still be the case. Despite the best efforts of the US State Department, not every ally has enthusiastically ripped and replaced all of its Huawei kit. Some have loosened their replacement requirements, while Germany has taken a decisive step by mandating non-Huawei (and non-ZTE) critical component management software – see Germany finally unveils Huawei, ZTE ban plan.

Since the core of the US argument was that Huawei could have smuggled secret back-door APIs into the code with the intention of spying or causing chaos, German telcos have been given a choice: Replace the suspect code, no easy or cheap feat, or rip out and replace the lot. 

It will be interesting to see how this saga plays out, starting on 10 September. 

– Ian Scales, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV