The official price tag for the Mate X, Huawei’s first foldable phone, is 16,999 yuan ($2,400). But getting one is super difficult, so people were taking advantage of this to make a profit.
On Taobao, one of China’s most popular e-commerce platform, some vendors were selling the device at as high as 99,000 yuan ($14,000), almost six times the official price set by Huawei.
Not all vendors on Taobao set such a high price for the Mate X, with some saying they have customers ordering the device at a little more than 60,000 yuan but one buyer can only buy two at the most.
On Xianyu, a popular flea market under Alibaba, the price of the device also ranges widely with some having a markup of 20,000 yuan while some also ask for 99,000 yuan.
The Mate X became available to customers in China on November 15 and was sold out in the first minute at Huawei’s online store.
Huawei didn’t reveal how many of the device were sold. Latest information showed it will become available again at 10:08 am on November 22.
For fans of foldable phones, they have another choice in China which is the Galaxy Fold made by Samsung.
The Galaxy Fold is priced at 15,999 yuan ($2,290) and became available to customers in China at 10 am on November 16.
However, as cnTechPost noted Saturday, the device was available at least in the first 20 minutes
This marks a sharp contrast with the performance of the device’s previous round of sales in China and also pales when compared with Huawei’s Mate X.
The Mate X is a 5G phone with Huawei's Kirin 980 processor and Barong 5000 modem. The model available has 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.
The Galaxy Fold has 12GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. However, it only has LTE variant, with the 5G variant to arrive sometime later this month.
A lack of 5G should be a major concern for many Chinese customers as 5G commercial services are now available in a total of 50 Chinse cities and there are dozens of regular phones that support the ultra-fast network.
Despite this, different inventory strategy may have also played a big role in the two devices’ performances.
According to Lao Yao, a seasoned China tech watcher, Samsung has about 400,000 Galaxy Fold available to global customers while Huawei only has 30,000.
A low inventory levels for a popular product means it has a low market depth like a financial asset, which inevitably make the price fluctuate much more wildly.
