Chinese tech conglomerate Huawei has unveiled its Mate 90 smartphone series, powered by its in-house operating system and redesigned chip architecture to boost the device’s performance, as the US curbs on shipments of advanced semiconductors have severely hampered the venture’s product R&D capability.
Huawei consumer business chief Richard Yu referred to the absence of advanced chips as a “constraint,” as he stated, “Advanced semiconductor capacity remains very limited in China, and Huawei’s Ascend AI chips also draw on that same capacity.”
“The capacity for smartphone chips remains tight, even though rising smartphone prices have curbed shipment volumes (for handsets),” he stated further.
Commercial success of the Mate 90 series is crucial for Huawei, as it will validate the efforts of the company to workaround the American export restrictions that have severely impacted its access to cutting-edge chipmaking tools, forcing the tech conglomerate to develop alternative ways to boost processor performance.
The Mate 90 series succeeds the Mate 80 line launched in November 2025. Huawei’s Kirin 9050 Pro, a system-on-chip built with a technique called “LogicFolding,” powers premium models like the Mate 90 Pro Max.
The method restructures a chip’s internal wiring in three dimensions (3D) rather than the conventional flat, two-dimensional layout, allowing for denser, faster processing.
However, the technology requires more semiconductor wafers to produce the units.
Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said at a media event in Shanghai last month that the supply of the company’s Ascend 950 AI chips could not meet domestic demand due to capacity constraints.
Yu said China’s advanced chipmaking still relies on deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines and that while extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology is “valuable,” domestic manufacturers are still working towards it.
“Huawei would use more chips built with the LogicFolding technique in future smartphones,” Yu remarked.
Huawei’s latest phones run on its homegrown, Android-free HarmonyOS 7 operating system, which, as per the tech conglomerate, supports more than 450,000 apps and services.
The Mate 90 Pro Max with 16 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage will be priced at 9,999 yuan (USD 1,491), 2,000 yuan more than the same version of its predecessor at launch. The standard and Pro models will have starting prices of 5,999 yuan and 6,999 yuan, respectively.
The top-end Mate 90 models have been tailored to deliver a 31% increase in overall performance over the previous flagship generation.
While Chinese smartphone makers have raised their product prices amid the elevated memory and component costs, Huawei has already added an average of USD 200 to the cost of each handset, weighing on the company’s profit margins.
“We have to increase prices as well, yet at a slower pace,” Yu told the media persons.
While China’s domestic smartphone shipments went down 7% between January and August, Huawei defied the trend by increasing its product deliveries by 13%, as per the data provided by research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
On the other hand, while the average selling price of smartphones in China climbed 11.3% in the second quarter to USD 543, the ratio, for Huawei devices, declined 14.7% to USD 628, IDC data showed.
Image Courtesy: Huawei