On September 29, 2026, Richard Yu, Executive Director, Chairman of the Investment Review Board, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Consumer BG, talked with journalists from some international media outlets about Huawei’s consumer business and HarmonyOS ecosystem. The following is a summary of the roundtable:
Richard Yu: I joined Huawei in 1993. That was 33 years ago. At the time, the company had just a few hundred people. Right now, we have more than 200,000 employees, and almost half of them are engaged in R&D.
Between 2007 and the end of 2025, Huawei invested more than CNY1.8 trillion into R&D. In the early years, we reinvested around 10% of our annual revenue into R&D; in recent years, that proportion has jumped to more than 20%.
We have continued to increase investment into the core technologies of the ICT domain and basic research, which has translated into robust core capabilities, extensive intellectual property, and a vast patent portfolio, and helped us achieve a series of breakthroughs in technological innovation. As the world enters the AI era, even more innovation and investment are needed. Huawei is continuing to forge ahead.
When I first joined the company, I worked on developing our first-generation program-controlled switch. Later on, I participated in the establishment of Huawei’s wireless communications business, which started with GSM. Over the last 10-plus years, I’ve been mainly responsible for running Huawei’s consumer business.
Our vision is to deliver a seamless AI life experience to all consumers across five key scenarios: HIMA-powered Smart Travel, HarmonyOS Office, Smart Home, Fitness & Health, and Entertainment.
This is also the long-term strategy for our consumer business over the next 10 years.
We have launched a broad series of products and solutions, including smartphones, PCs, tablets, wearables, TWS audio products, Smart TVs, home routers, and smart home control solutions. We have also launched intelligent electric vehicles together with our partners. Underlying these products and solutions are Huawei’s chip hardware platform and HarmonyOS that has been developed on this platform. We use HarmonyOS to support all the smart devices and smart hardware across all scenarios, and it is another OS ecosystem after iOS from Apple and Android from Google.
Huawei started the development of HarmonyOS in 2019 and now it powers over 90 million devices, with plans to hit 100 million by year-end, while actively leveraging its Ascend compute foundation, openPangu models, and Celia assistant to drive AI across consumer, corporate, and telecommunications sectors. While its global smartphone footprint was heavily curtailed, Huawei is strategically maintaining its international presence through market-leading wearables, TWS earphones, CPE connectivity devices, and growing HarmonyOS tablets, with long-term plans to cautiously expand HarmonyOS globally.
The Mate 90 series smartphones we just launched come with the latest Kirin 9050 Pro chip. The overall device performance is 31% higher than the previous generation. The Balong modem, image sensor processor (ISP), mobile security processor (MSP), Lingxi CPU, Maleoon GPU, and the NPU that adopts Huawei’s Da Vinci architecture for AI processing are all designed by us. They offer higher energy efficiency and deliver much-improved overall system-level performance, even though we have limited access to advanced semiconductor processes.
Recently, we have also made a new breakthrough in the semiconductor domain: the LogicFolding technology under the Tau Scaling Law.
Unveiled by He Tingbo, head of Huawei’s Semiconductor Business Department this May, this technology vertically stacks the logic layers of chips and restructures the circuit layout through inter-layer high-density interconnect to shorten critical paths and reduce latency. This technology was adopted on our Kirin 9050 Pro chip.
Question: You mentioned some products that are popular in overseas markets. Could you tell us which international markets you see the most potential in? What has Huawei seen in terms of the impact of the conflict in the Middle East on your consumer business?
Richard Yu: Many of our products are well received by consumers in the Middle East, Asia Pacific, some Latin America markets, and Europe, and we have a large number of loyal users in these markets.
For example, our wearables are very popular. The HUAWEI Watch has outstanding health and fitness features and is loved by consumers. I have been using our latest generation of smart watches that can measure blood pressure and assess blood sugar risks. This year, we will also launch innovative wearable products that directly deliver blood glucose readings. Other popular products include our earphones, tablets, as well as foldable and slab phones.
The conflict in the Middle East a while ago did affect the consumer market, and it is currently recovering. Overall, our whole consumer business is enjoying a positive momentum in markets outside China.
Question: It’s been about 15 days since the Huawei Mate XT2 hit the market. Do you have any specific numbers regarding the sales or shipment volume of that model to share? Apple has for the first time launched its foldable form products as well. What are your thoughts regarding its impact on Huawei’s position in this product category?
Richard Yu: The Mate XT2 is the second generation of our tri-fold phone products. The sales volume of the first generation and its optimized model exceeded 1 million units. The second generation just hit the market this month. To date, we have already shipped nearly 100,000 units, and we estimate the total shipment volume to exceed 1 million units as well.
This product is selling very well, and demand currently exceeds supply. In addition to its wing-like tri-fold design and powerful hardware performance, another important reason for its popularity is the numerous innovations in terms of software and user experience that are loved by premium users. The HarmonyOS 7 that powers the phone is specifically optimized for the triple-fold design, adapting to the large screens and panoramic multi-screen scenarios. This phone also has a unique screen privacy feature that ensures user privacy without sacrificing screen display effects, and toggling the privacy mode on or off is quite easy.
We’ll gradually make this tri-fold phone available in the overseas market. Many users in the Middle East and Asia Pacific love it. I also hope that we can bring it to other markets like Europe.
Huawei has been working on foldable phones for eight years and has always been a true pioneer when it comes to foldable phone innovation.
For example, we are the first vendor to develop the “waterdrop” advanced precision hinge system, a technical breakthrough that ensures the foldable phone closes seamlessly with zero gap when folded.
I’m very pleased to see the recent launch of foldable phones by our US peers. Actually, we launched a similar product with landscape folding, the Pura X, in the spring of last year. Back then, we designed a smaller and also a bigger version of this foldable phone, and our original plan was to launch them at the same time. Since we devoted a lot of resources and efforts to building the HarmonyOS ecosystem, we postponed the launch of the bigger version, the Pura X Max, to April this year. When we were about to launch this widescreen foldable phone, we saw online reports about our US peer developing a similar phone.
The widescreen foldable phone was originally from Huawei and we started earlier.
I’m very pleased that during the week after the launch of the iPhone Duo, the sales volume of our Pura X Max went up by 76%. Maybe that’s because the consumers like our product more.
Over the past several months after its launch, the sales volume of the Pura X Max has exceeded 1 million units.
We welcome our peers to join us in the competition and deliver better products and services to consumers. Such healthy competition can also motivate more users to choose foldable phones.
Camera design for foldable phones has been a tough industry challenge due to the physical design constraints for camera modules. If you want better camera performance, the sensor area needs to be larger, which means the lens must protrude further. We are able to deliver superior camera performance for foldable phones thanks to our breakthrough in camera module miniaturization technology. The camera performance of our latest foldable phone rivals that of some flagship slab phones.
In addition, we have managed to ensure the reliability of foldable phone screens through continuous technological innovation. Users sometimes use their phones in low- or high-temperature environments. They sometimes drop the phone on the ground, which has an enormous impact on the hinge system. It is extremely difficult to address these issues.
Huawei was the first vendor to make breakthroughs in many reliability technology domains, and has made many contributions to the whole industry.
As a pioneer, we have put in huge R&D investment. We’ve conducted extensive basic research and done a lot of reliability experiments to address numerous challenges. Since I myself am in charge of this business, I know how hard it has been for us to make these achievements. Today, we have a 75% share of the Chinese foldable phone market.
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