Limited supplies of Huawei’s tri-fold Mate XT smartphone spurred prices to more than double or treble in Shenzhen ahead of its official availability tomorrow (20 September), as resellers took advantage of surging demand.

Portal Huawei Central reported prices jumped to between CNY60,000 ($8,500) and CNY70,000 in parts of the city bordering Hong Kong and online.

The official price starts at CNY19,999 for the version sporting 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage.

Some 6.3 million units were ordered at official VMall stores since 7 September, various Chinese news sites wrote.

The world’s first foldable with two hinges created a huge buzz in China, as Huawei emerged as a national champion for defying widening US trade sanctions for five years.

A Huawei source said off the record “everyone is crazy about the XT and it’s totally nuts here”.

Huawei boldly timed its launch event hours after Apple unveiled the iPhone 16, when accounting for international time zones.

In contrast to buoyant demand for the Mate XT, TF International Securities analyst Kuo Ming-Chi estimated iPhone 16 orders in the first weekend the process was opened were 12.7 per cent less than the iPhone 15 at 37 million units, with the figures based on a regular supply chain survey.

Radio Free Mobile founder Richard Windsor spectacled about the reason behind the steep price of the Mate XT, pointing to the use of the Kirin 9010 processor produced using a 7nm multi-patterning technique, which has a lower yield than the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process and so makes the finished chips more costly.