SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Huawei is seeing less consumer excitement in China for its newly launched Mate 70 smartphone, which could impact the Chinese tech giant’s overall shipments for the year to benefit Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and other Chinese brands, brokerage Jefferies said.
Jefferies said in a note published on Thursday that its observation of online discussions after the Mate 70 was launched on Tuesday was that there was “much less enthusiasm”, based on frequency of reviews and online commentary.
It now saw downside risk to an initial estimate it had made for Huawei to ship 48 million phones this year, as an earlier product, the Pura 70, had only shipped 5 million units since its April launch this year, Jefferies said.
The Mate 70’s predecessor, the Mate 60 which marked Huawei’s comeback to high-end smartphones when it was rolled out last year, had shipped 12 million-13 million units to date, below their initial estimates of 15-16 million.
“We believe Mate 70’s ultimate sales volume could be below that of Mate 60,” the analysts said.
“It seems our Huawei shipment forecast of 48 million this year has downside, which is positive for iPhone and other brands.”
Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Huawei touted the Mate 70 as the most powerful Mate phone but analysts and consumers have said improvements over its predecessor appear to be limited.
While the Mate 60 made a big splash by revealing that Huawei was able to overcome years of U.S. sanctions and locally make an advanced chip, it has found it difficult to make much improvements in terms of performance and production yield, Reuters had reported.
This resulted in shortages of the Mate 60 in the first few months of its launch and Jefferies said it expects supply bottlenecks related to chip production for the Mate 70 as well.
Toby Zhu, an analyst at consultancy Canalys, said consumer reaction cooling down to Huawei’s new phone was inevitable, as industry and consumer hype would naturally subside after Huawei’s initial comeback.
On the contrary, he added that he expected Mate 70 sales volume to show slight growth compared to the Mate 60 series, partly due to sufficient flagship production capacity.
The patriotic sentiment surrounding Huawei’s technological breakthrough has helped fuel its market recovery and intensified competition with other players.
Huawei was ranked as China’s No.2 smartphone vendor in the third quarter of 2024, with deliveries exceeding 10 million units for the fourth straight quarter, according to research firm Canalys.
This is a significant rebound from the second quarter of 2022, when it shipped just 4.1 million units.