Demand ‘excessive’ for Huawei’s Mate 70 smartphones, exec tells state media

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BEIJING (Reuters) – Huawei’s supply chain team is working overtime to meet demand for its new Mate 70 smartphones as supplies they had initially prepared were insufficient, an executive told the state-owned Securities Times newspaper on Thursday.

He Gang, Huawei’s consumer business group CEO, said reservations for the phone, which do not require customers to put down a deposit, had exceeded 6.7 million so far and described demand for it as “excessive”.

Huawei launched the Mate 70 phone last week as a successor to the Mate 60, which made a big splash in 2023 by revealing that Huawei was able to overcome years of U.S. sanctions and locally make an advanced chip.

Analysts, however, said this week that they saw less consumer excitement for the Mate 70 and that they believed the smartphone could face supply bottlenecks related to chip production.

The Mate 70 series is also the first major commercial rollout of the HarmonyOS NEXT, a significant step in Huawei’s push for software independence since U.S. curbs cut off its access to Google services in 2019.

HarmonyOS NEXT is the Android-free version of Huawei’s operating system that began testing this year, marking a complete departure from the Android code as the company seeks to eliminate its reliance on U.S. technology.

He told the newspaper it could take another two to three months for the user experience of HarmonyOS NEXT to be perfected, adding that the company will equip all its new phones next year with the operating system.

(Reporting by Liz Lee and Brenda Goh; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Muralikumar Anantharaman)