BEIJING — China's Huawei and Xiaomi unveiled new foldable smartphones two days before Apple is set to introduce its first foldable device, stepping into a market led by Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) that is expanding as Apple prepares to enter. Apple, meanwhile, faces forecasts that its first production run will amount to only a few hundred units because of shortages of components such as hinges and low manufacturing yields on folding displays.
Huawei held a product launch event on the 7th and officially released its flagship foldable smartphone, the Mate XT2, according to local media. The device is the second generation of the tri-fold phone the company introduced in September 2024, and it adopts a G-shaped design that folds the left and right panels inward rather than the Z-shaped structure of the first generation. Preorders that opened on the 31st of last month sold out as soon as they began.
The new model carries a new Kirin chip built on what Huawei calls the law of tau, a reference to the time constant in physics and the company's theory for improving semiconductor performance. The core idea is to shorten signal transmission time by folding circuits vertically instead of shrinking transistors.
Xiaomi also formally unveiled the Xiaomi 18 Fold, its first wide foldable flagship, at a product event held the same day. Like Huawei's new device, it adopts a wide form factor and is the first to carry the company's in-house mobile application processor, the XRing O3. Xiaomi emphasized improving on-device artificial intelligence performance and power efficiency — processing AI computations within the device rather than on cloud servers — using its own AI model and a neural processing unit.
Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Ultra, which the company will unveil on the 9th, has run into production problems, according to a report.
Nikkei Asia reported on the 7th, citing a person familiar with the matter, that Apple's quality requirements are so demanding that the company added another round of trial production in August before actual mass production began. As of the end of last month, output was ramping up slowly at a level of several hundred units a day, and that initial volume may not be enough to meet market demand, the report said. Apple began production with a target of 8 million to 10 million iPhone Ultra units this year. Meeting that target would require making tens of thousands of units a day.
What has held Apple back is poor yields on hinges and display flatness. The hinge is the key component determining quality in a foldable phone, where the display bends. Because of Apple's extremely high quality control standards, initial output has remained at several hundred units a day, leaving the company unlikely to meet its launch date, according to the report.
The iPhone 18 series, launching alongside the iPhone Ultra, is also expected to face difficulty securing supply early on because of a memory shortage driven by AI demand. Foreign media reported that as of last month, A20 application processors for the iPhone 18 series waiting on packaging because memory had not been delivered amounted to about $1 billion, or roughly 1.4 trillion won. That is equivalent to about 20 million iPhones, or 20% of the initial launch volume.
Global foldable smartphone shipments will top 22 million units this year, up more than 22% from a year earlier, according to research firm Omdia. Shipments are projected to grow at an average annual rate of more than 20% through 2028, reaching 36 million units. Most Chinese smartphone makers, including Xiaomi, which have concentrated on low- and mid-priced handsets, are shifting heavily toward the mid- to high-end segment led by Samsung Electronics and Apple after being hit this year by slowing demand, memory shortages and surging prices.
