Huawei leads foldable market
Reports say Huawei now holds about 70% of the global foldable‑phone market, helped by its Pura X series, and launched what is described as the world’s first horizontal wide foldable phone. The market‑share and product launch coverage are cited as signals of Huawei’s consumer momentum. (huaweicentral.com; thebridgechronicle.com)
Huawei’s Pura X has pushed the company to roughly 70% of China’s foldable-phone market, according to recent reports citing International Data Corporation data. (huaweicentral.com) The figure in those reports is about China, not the world: one report says Huawei held 71.8% of China’s foldable market in 2025, while an earlier International Data Corporation-based report put Huawei at 76.6% in China in the first quarter of 2025. (abit.ee; gsmarena.com) Huawei introduced the Pura X on March 20, 2025, with a starting price of 7,499 yuan, or about $1,037 at the time, and said it was the first device to ship with HarmonyOS 5. (cnbc.com) A foldable phone is a handset with a flexible screen and hinge, and the Pura X differs from most flip models by opening into a wider 16:10 screen instead of a tall, narrow one. Huawei said the inside display measures 6.3 inches, with a 3.5-inch outer screen when closed. (cnbc.com; news.cgtn.com) That design matters because foldables have often asked buyers to accept awkward screen shapes in exchange for novelty. Huawei pitched the Pura X as a more tablet-like format in a pocket-size device, aiming at video, reading and multitasking use cases. (news.cgtn.com; gadgets360.com) The phone also sits inside Huawei’s broader effort to replace Android dependencies with its own software stack after United States sanctions cut the company off from Google services in 2019. CNBC reported that HarmonyOS 5 no longer relies on Android’s open-source code base. (cnbc.com) Huawei’s smartphone business had already been recovering in China before the Pura X arrived. International Data Corporation data cited by CNBC showed Huawei’s overall smartphone share in China rose to 16.2% in the fourth quarter of 2024, up from 13.7% a year earlier, while Apple’s share fell from 20% to 17.4%. (cnbc.com) The wider market context is less clear-cut outside China. International Data Corporation said global smartphone shipments rose 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 336.9 million units, with Samsung and Apple driving much of the premium-market growth and foldables contributing to momentum. (idc.com) Some recent coverage has described Huawei’s next device, the Pura X Max, as a new “wide foldable” and said it was set for an April 20, 2026 launch. That suggests Huawei is trying to turn the Pura X layout from a one-off product into a broader product line. (9to5google.com; gadgets360.com) The cleanest read on the numbers is this: Huawei is dominating foldables in China, and the Pura X is central to that run. Claims that Huawei has 70% of the global foldable market were not supported by the sources I found; the sourced figures point to China’s foldable segment. (huaweicentral.com; idc.com)
