During the presentation of the Huawei Mate X2 foldable smartphone, Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO Yu ChengDong confirmed that the HarmonyOS operating system for Huawei smartphones will be launched in April, and the Mate X2 will be one of the first devices to get the new OS.
Huawei P50 is the first smartphone to arrive with HarmonyOS out of the box
Now it is reported that the first smartphone with a pre-installed HarmonyOS operating system should be the flagship Huawei P50, which is expected to be announced in March this year. Yu Chengdong has confirmed that the company will release the first phone with HarmonyOS pre-installed in the first quarter of 2021, which ends on March 31.
The global version of the Huawei P50 is expected to be equipped with EMUI 11.1; while the Chinese version will receive HarmonyOS. The smartphone will be deprived of Google services, instead, users will be offered Huawei Mobile Services and the AppGallery store.
The Chinese tech giant has announced partnerships with many smart home appliance companies. Huawei has set a goal to bring the number of HarmonyOS smart devices to 300-400 million units by the end of this year.
This smart technology can be controlled using smartphones with HarmonyOS; the first of which will be Huawei P50 and Huawei Mate X2.
Huawei: We will never sell our smartphone business
Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of Huawei, said on Tuesday that Huawei will survive the sanctions imposed by Donald Trump and look forward to a renewed relationship with the United States when new President Joe Biden comes to power.
Joe Biden took over as head of the White House last month. Huawei now expects the new US president to improve relations between the two countries; as well as American and Chinese companies. Ren Zhengfei said Huawei remains determined to buy equipment from US companies and that restoring Huawei’s access to US goods is mutually beneficial. In addition, he suggests that the restrictions on the Chinese tech giant will hurt US suppliers.
“We hope the new US administration would have an open policy for the benefit of American firms and the economic development of the United States,” said Ren. “We still hope that we can buy large volumes of American materials, components, and equipment so that we can all benefit from China’s growth.”
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The leader of the company also denied information that Huawei is going out of the smartphone business.
“We have decided we absolutely will not sell off our consumer devices, our smartphone business,” he said.
The company will unveil the flagship foldable smartphone Huawei Mate X2 on February 22nd; and the Huawei P50 is expected to be announced in March.
Huawei completely defeats Apple in the Chinese phone market in 2020
According to CINNO Research and Canalys, Huawei still comfortably leads the Chinese smartphone market. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) mobile phone quarterly tracking report, China’s smartphone market shipments in the fourth quarter of 2020 were approximately 86.4 million units, a slight increase of 0.3% year-on-year.
In the fourth quarter, shipments of Apple, OPPO, Vivo, and Xiaomi all increased significantly. In terms of specific rankings in the fourth quarter, Huawei, Apple, OPPO, Vivo, and Xiaomi ranked in the top five. Although Huawei fell 34.5% year-on-year, it still ranks first with a 25.1% share.
Looking at the entire 2020, Huawei is still miles ahead of the competition. It has a 38.3% market share which is a 0.1% decrease from its 38.4% market share of 2019. In second place is Vivo with a 17.7% market share. This shows that Huawei in the first position has a market share that is over 50% higher than second-place Vivo. Oppo, Xiaomi, and Apple rank third to fifth respectively. Except for Apple’s year-on-year growth, the other four manufacturers all have different degrees of decline.
In the fourth quarter, the Chinese 5G mobile phone shipments were about 60 million units. In 2020, the cumulative shipments were about 167 million units, accounting for more than 50%.
