Huawei, Xiaomi phones beat out the iPhone during China's recent shopping holiday

China's Singles' Day, celebrated each November 11th (11/11), is an unofficial holiday for people in the country who are not in a relationship. It happens to take place during what has become a multi-week shopping festival in China. Reuters cites data from Counterpoint Research which says the iPhone 15 line was outperformed at the register by phones from domestic phone manufacturers like Huawei and Xiaomi during the holiday shopping period.

During the two weeks from October 30th to November 12th, Counterpoint says that iPhone sales in China declined 4%. Meanwhile, led by its first 5G flagship series in three years, Huawei's Singles' Day sales rose 66% year-over-year while Xiaomi's sales rose 28% during the same period. Thanks to the gains scored by those two manufacturers, overall smartphone sales in the country during the Singles' Day shopping holiday rose 5% year-over-year.

Huawei's Mate 60 Pro series electrified the country and injected some nationalism into the domestic smartphone market as Huawei was able to get around U.S. sanctions placed on the manufacturer. The Mate 60 line is powered by the 5G Kirin 9000s chipset which was made using the 7nm process node belonging to China's largest foundry, SMIC. Foundries using American technology to build cutting-edge chips are not allowed to ship such chips to Huawei.

Huawei's previous flagship models, last year's Mate 50 line and this year's P60 series, were driven by a special version of the 4nm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset that works with 4G networks but not 5G networks. There is still some controversy over how the Kirin 9000s chips were made.

The iPhone 15 series starts at ¥5999 which is equivalent to $845.27. The Huawei Mate 60 line is priced at ¥5499 and up, equivalent to $774.82, and the Xiaomi 14 line starts at ¥3999, equivalent to $563.49.

Last year, Chinese e-commerce platforms Alibaba and JD.com stopped revealing sales figures for the Singles' Day shopping period. JD.com did state that the volume of Apple products sold on its platform during the 2023 shopping festival amounted to more than 10 billion yuan (over $1.39 billion). Xiaomi said that its sales on all platforms during the shopping festival hit 22.4 billion yuan ($3.16 billion).