Since Huawei entered the winter due to the "Entity List" in 2019, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have taken on the important task of competing directly with Apple and have entered the blue ocean of the high-end market one after another.

Xiaomi invested billions of dollars over three years to explore its own high-end path, while OV focused on patented technologies and refined their Ultra product lines.

After splitting with Huawei, Honor has continuously increased its investment in the foldable screen market, emerging as a dark horse and even surpassing Huawei for a time.

According to earlier statistics from Omdia, in the third quarter of 2023, Honor captured 28% of the market with the Magic V2, surpassing Huawei's flagship product "Mate X3" in shipments.

Now, five years later, as Huawei returns to normalcy, who will dominate the high-end market?

Recently, research firm Canalys released the domestic rankings for the first quarter of this year. In the price segment above $600, Huawei reversed the trend and increased by 67%, eating into nearly a quarter of the market share.

Although Apple still dominates half of the market, it has not reversed the downward trend. The fluctuation in the domestic market is particularly evident, with a decline of up to 25%.

Looking further down, Honor, the dark horse, was rivaling Huawei early in the year, with both increasing by more than half. Xiaomi, on the other hand, saw the largest decline among the top five manufacturers, reaching 43%.

Although Samsung does not rank highly in the domestic market overall, it still holds a place in the high-end category. However, judging from its slight decline, the S24 Ultra does not seem to have reached the heights of its predecessor, the "concert artifact".

From the perspective of product release schedule, Huawei's ability to surge by nearly 70% in the first quarter is largely attributed to the popularity of the Mate 60 series, coupled with the launch of the small foldable Pocket 2 in March.

An earlier report from Counterpoint pointed out that Huawei's foldable screen sales reached another peak in Q1, with a year-on-year increase of 257%. In contrast, Apple, which was already absent from the foldable screen market, only resorted to the strategy of "trading price for volume" during this year's 618 shopping festival, resulting in a less impressive performance.

Even looking ahead to the second quarter, Huawei has the Pura 70 series as a foundation, coupled with the emergence of the variable vivo X100 Ultra. Apple's high-end stronghold built up over the past few years is expected to falter.