On 20 September, Huawei and Apple went head-to-head again. Both tech giants’ latest smartphones, the trifold Mate XT of Huawei and Apple’s iPhone 16 series, went on sale, after announcing the products on the same day roughly a week earlier.
Many online have been discussing the result of the first day for both phones. It seems, on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter equivalent at least, Huawei came out on top with the topic “Huawei trifold phone sold out in seconds” reaching number 44 on the Hot Search list, with 3.86 million views. iPhone 16-related hashtags are mostly about resellers paying 400 RMB (56.70 USD) extra for the Pro Max version and are not interested in the Pro.
However, some pundits online are turning their interest to another announcement Huawei made on the same day, the reveal of the hotly anticipated wearable tech, including the new watches. Scheduled to be officially announced at the press event on 24 September, the watches were shown at the Innovative Product Launch in Barcelona on 19 September. The latest products will likely include the Watch GT 5 series, the Sound Joy 2 smart speaker, the V5 Max 110-inch large screen and the WATCH Ultimate.
Another Huawei-related Hot Search is about Yinwang (引望), a company that was formerly a business unit of the company in “intelligent automotive solution”. It was created earlier this year and Xu Zhijun, the rotating chairman of Huawei, discussed the strategy of Yinwang in a recent interview. The topic “Huawei rotating chairman discusses Yinwang strategy for the first time” landed at number 32 on the Hot Search list on Weibo with 11.44 million views. Xu stated that Yinwang adopts a different business model than conventional automotive companies. Instead, it uses software to define automotive and creates innovative ways of partnership, profit and risk sharing. Yinwang will improve user experience in the whole life cycle of a vehicle bought by consumers.
Huawei is showing off its progress across industries from smartphone and wearable tech to automotive. By timing its announcements and releases against Apple, Huawei steals some of the limelight with its innovations, mostly through comparison with Apple’s perceived lack of innovation, smaller updates and unreleased AI features. The quick sellout of the trifold Mate XT, however, shows that Huawei has successfully converted the interest into sales.
