Huawei Mate 90 Hits Shelves to Packing Crowds — As the ¥12,999 RS Ultimate Design Sells Out in Minutes
Huawei Mate 90 Hits Shelves to Packing Crowds — As the ¥12,999 RS Ultimate Design Sells Out in Minutes
Huawei’s new Mate 90 flagship lineup went on sale across China on October 1 and immediately drew “sea of people” crowds to brand stores nationwide — with the most expensive model, the ¥12,999 ($1,830) Mate 90 RS Ultimate Design, snapping out of stock almost the moment it hit the shelves.+1
The series launched at a ceremony on the morning of October 1 — China’s National Day holiday — and opened for sale across all channels at 12:08 p.m. the same day, the first time a Huawei flagship has gone from announcement to availability within hours. Within minutes, online platforms including Huawei’s own Vmall and JD.com showed the RS Ultimate Design as out of stock, while images from Huawei flagship stores in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing and Dongguan showed queues snaking out the doors, amplified by the holiday shopping foot traffic.+2
Inside the stores: “One-day store manager” and elbow-to-elbow crowds
At the Huawei flagship store in Shenzhen’s MixC World, He Gang, CEO of Huawei’s Terminal BG, donned a staff uniform to serve as “one-day store manager,” personally demonstrating the new imaging and chip features and handing the first units to early buyers. Reporters on the scene described the demo zone as “packed to the point of being airtight” before the launch event had even concluded.+1
Store staff said the standard Mate 90 and Mate 90 Pro still had limited walk-in stock, but the Pro Max Collector’s Edition and the RS Ultimate Design were effectively impossible to buy on the spot — customers could only register and wait for a restock notification, with no firm timeline offered. Green and orange colorways were reported as the fastest movers at several locations.+1
Pricing: pricier than last year, yet the priciest models moved fastest
The lineup spans five models. The base Mate 90 starts at ¥5,999, the Pro at ¥6,999, the Pro Max at ¥9,499, the Pro Max Collector’s Edition at ¥10,999, and the RS Ultimate Design at ¥12,999 — with the fully loaded RS 16GB+2TB variant reaching ¥18,999. Prices across the board are up roughly ¥1,000 from the Mate 80 generation, driven largely by surging memory costs.+1
Huawei’s messaging has leaned into that reality. “In today’s environment of sharply rising memory prices, our pricing is still very sincere,” Richard Yu, Huawei’s consumer and intelligent automotive group chief, said at the launch. Huawei also raised prices on the outgoing Mate 80 last month, narrowing the effective price gap, and national purchase subsidies bring the base model’s street price back down to around ¥5,499.+1
Yet the striking pattern this launch cycle is that demand concentrated at the very top. The RS Ultimate Design — the halo model with dual satellite communication (Tiantong plus BeiDou), the world’s first “four-SIM, three-standby” setup, and the new Kirin 9050 Pro chip built on Huawei’s “logic folding” architecture — vanished from shelves and e-commerce listings within minutes of the 12:08 opening.+1
Why the expensive end is hottest
Several forces appear to be converging. The RS and Pro Max Collector’s Edition are the only models that support the new Ruying Z10 — a clip-on 1-inch sensor camera module offering 10x continuous optical zoom — a genuine draw for the photography-obsessed buyers who form the Mate series’ core base. Early hands-on visitors in Shenzhen and Dongguan were seen lining up specifically to test the Z10’s telephoto performance in store.+1
Analysts and local media also point to a more structural factor: Huawei’s advanced chip capacity remains tight, and the company is deliberately allocating its scarcest Kirin 9050 Pro silicon toward the highest-margin ultra-premium tiers, while the standard version keeps volume and market share. The result is a classic constrained-supply dynamic — limited units, high visibility, and instant sell-outs at the top end.
Scalpers were quick to appear as well. Within hours of the first-sale window, listings offering the RS Ultimate Design at significant markups began surfacing on second-hand platforms, echoing scenes from previous Mate launches.
A bellwether for China’s premium market
The launch lands at a moment when most of China’s smartphone market is stuck in a low-growth replacement cycle, and few new releases manage to pull consumers off their sofas and into physical stores. That the Mate 90 managed it — and did so disproportionately at the ¥13,000-plus end of the range — is being read by industry watchers as fresh evidence of resilient demand at the very top of the domestic premium segment, and of the pull that Huawei’s homegrown Kirin chips, HarmonyOS 7 (now on more than 90 million devices) and imaging breakthroughs continue to exert on loyal users.+1
Challenges remain visible on the horizon. Yu himself acknowledged that advanced semiconductor capacity in China “remains very limited” and that rising memory costs have added roughly $200 to the average bill of materials per device. Whether the Mate 90’s red-hot debut translates into sustained momentum — rather than a one-week buzz dampened by scalper premiums and thin supply — will become clear in the coming restock cycles.