Huawei released the Pocket 2 vertical folding phone, with a price starting at 7499 yuan

Text / Tencent Digital Li Haidan

Yu Chengdong, Executive Director of Huawei, CEO of Device BG, and Chairman of Intelligent Vehicle Solution BU

At the beginning of 2024, just after the Spring Festival, Huawei began to make efforts on small folding screen mobile phones. On February 22, Huawei held the "Pocket 2 Fashion Festival" in Sanya, Hainan Province, and officially announced the release of the small folding mobile phone Pocket 2. Pre-orders are available from today and will be on sale on March 1, with a starting price of 7,499 yuan.

Pocket2 continues the small folding design of the previous generation, including 1 circular camera module and 1 circular secondary screen on the back of the fuselage, equipped with a 6.94-inch inner screen, supporting 2690x1136 ultra-high resolution. There are a lot of improvements in the overall function:

1. Pocket 2 makes up for the regret of using Qualcomm Snapdragon 4G chips, and is equipped with Kirin 9000S series chips that support two-way Beidou satellite messages. In the absence of terrestrial network signals, messages can still be sent to the outside world, multiple generated trajectories are supported, and the "quick help" function has been added.

2. Pocket 2 mainly has 4 color versions, namely Tahitian Gray, Rococo White, Taro Purple, Ya Black, and an artistic custom version of Blue Dream Color. The art custom version is created by inviting artist and Dutch fashion designer Iris Herpen to create and launch, focusing on a technological fashion aesthetic.

3. The battery capacity has also been increased from 4000mAh to 4520mAh, and it supports 66W wired fast charging and 40W unlimited fast charging, which is also a lot improved.

4. Using basalt water drop hinge, when the phone is folded, this hinge part can form a curve similar to a water droplet, which helps to protect the screen and reduce the pressure on the screen when folding. Yu Chengdong said that the flatness of the Pocket 2 has improved by 62%.

5. Added water resistance function, Pocket 2 supports 2 meters of IPX8 water resistance, Yu Chengdong said that this level is the deepest depth of water resistance for folding mobile phones in the industry.

6. Pocket 2 adopts full-focal length XMAGE quad camera, and the first hyperspectral AI fusion perception algorithm, which can be used for sun protection detection, deep sunspot detection, etc.

This is the first time that Huawei has released new products in the form of a fashion festival, and invited three fashion experience officers: well-known actors Zhuang Dafei, Wang Anyu, and Chen Turin to share their experience of fashion life and product use. For this folding phone, Huawei focuses on creating a young and fashionable label.

Fashion Experience Officer Wang Anyu

Will the Pocket 2 become Huawei's new generation of "star products"? Let's start with a question mark. According to the relevant sales data, the top 3 domestic sales in 2023 are Huawei Mate X5, Huawei Mate X3, and Huawei Pocket S. Whether the Pocket 2 can be loved by consumers this time may depend largely on female consumers.

In recent years, the strong growth of small folding screen mobile phones can be attributed to the female consumer group. According to the "2023 Folding Screen Mobile Phone Trend Fun Guide" released by JD.com, more than 70% of the users who buy folding screens in 2022 are men, but women are also growing rapidly, especially small folding screens, and female users of small folding screens have increased by more than 200% year-on-year.

With the release of Huawei's small folding, we also see that the launch of many functions (such as sunscreen detection, etc.) is more targeted for female consumers. Will the Pocket 2 be loved by female consumers?

Domestic folding screen mobile phones are "blooming", and Huawei is the only one

Review the history of folding screen mobile phones. From 2019, several major smartphone manufacturers launched the first generation of folding screen phones, such as the Huawei Mate X and Samsung Galaxy Fold, which became a key milestone in the development history of folding screen phones. Up to now, folding screen mobile phones have come to their fifth year, and leading domestic mobile phone brands such as OPPO, Xiaomi, and vivo have also joined the field of folding screen mobile phones, opening a competitive situation of "a hundred flowers blooming".

Judging from the development of the past few years, the folding mobile phone market has grown rapidly, and there is still a lot of room for growth. Affected by the current situation of the industry such as market saturation and long user replacement cycle, the shipment volume of China's smartphone market has been declining since 2018. However, folding screen mobile phones have continued to achieve rapid growth. According to the latest data from IDC, in the fourth quarter of 2023, China's folding screen mobile phone market shipped about 2.771 million units, a year-on-year increase of 149.6%.

In 2023, there will be a number of folding screen phones on the market, such as Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5, Huawei Mate X3, Mate X5, Honor Magic V2, OPPO Find N3, vivo X Fold2, and Xiaomi MIX Fold3.

For the market performance of folding screen mobile phone manufacturers, Huawei has always been the leader. According to the latest data from IDC, Huawei occupies the first position in the domestic folding screen market in 2023, with a market share of 37.4%. OPPO gained a market share of 18.3%, ranking second in the overall folding screen market, while Honor made efforts in the folding screen mobile phone market in the second half of 2023, winning the third place in the folding screen mobile phone market for the whole year, with a share of 17.7%, the fastest growth rate. Samsung has more than half of the global foldable phone market, but only has an 11% market share in the highly competitive domestic market, ranking fourth, and vivo ranking fifth.

Source: IDC China, February 2024 data

Behind the contrarian growth: a competition and "dark war" of domestic supply chain

In 2024, the folding screen form will continue to evolve. It is reported that Huawei will launch a trifold mobile phone as soon as the second quarter of this year. Behind such rapid iteration, it relies on the acceleration and breakthrough of the transformation of the folding screen supply chain to localization.

In the folding screen mobile phone industry chain, flexible screens and hinges are key technical links.

Before the rise of the domestic supply chain, almost all folding screen mobile phones needed to rely on Samsung's flexible AMOLED screen solution. After a series of technical overcome, a number of domestic panel manufacturers have grown rapidly and cultivated a relatively mature flexible AMOLED screen industry chain.

According to CINNO Research statistics, from the perspective of market structure, in 2023, Samsung Display (SDC) shipments in the global AMOLED smartphone panel market will decline by 8.2% year-on-year, and its market share will fall below 50%, a year-on-year decrease of 13.2 percentage points, and its domestic brand orders will continue to shift to domestic manufacturers, while BOE (BOE) shipments will increase by 44.7% year-on-year to 16.2% The company's market share ranked second in the world and ranked first in China, while Visionox's shipments increased by 68.4% year-on-year, with a market share of 9.9%. China's flexible manufacturing is rapidly rising, reshaping the market landscape.

数据来源：CINNO Quarterly Mobile Phone Panel Value Chain Report

At present, Huawei's flexible folding screen mainly uses BOE's unique high-end flexible OLED technology solution, F-OLED. As the earliest manufacturer of flexible AMOLED screen technology in China, Visionox has more than 10 folding screen mobile phones, including Huawei P50 Pocket and Honor Magic V, some of which are provided by Visionox.

In addition, in terms of hinges, the final thinness and thickness of folding screen mobile phones are directly related to it. And the cost of hinges in folding screen mobile phones accounts for a relatively high proportion, taking OPPO Find N as an example, referring to its official maintenance quotation table, which includes hinges and flexible panels, the cost of the main screen components accounts for the highest proportion (up to 43.5%), and the cost of hinges for folding screen mobile phones is expected to account for about 10%. In the early stage of the development of folding screens, taking MIM (metal injection molding), the core component process of hinge manufacturing, as an example, Amphenol of the United States was the first choice of many mobile phone manufacturers. With the rapid iteration of the domestic supply chain, independent research and development of hinge technology has become the core solution of mainstream terminal factories. In general, the localization process of the folding screen industry chain is rapid, and it is expected to further reduce the cost of folding screen mobile phones in the future.