As Oppo and Vivo retire, Huawei and Samsung plan to explore new foldable designs

This year, there could be some surprising developments in the foldable phone industry as major changes are expected to be made to the product lineups and business strategies of Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Samsung.

Huawei is preparing to launch a new dual-hinged/dual-folding phone in an attempt to take over Samsung’s lucrative foldable phone market, according to a recent report (via Hankyung).

According to reports, Huawei is getting ready to launch production of this Z-shaped foldable phone in the first half of 2023. When fully unfolded, the foldable panel will measure 10 inches, allowing it to function as a tablet.

Samsung is developing a new foldable phone of its own:

The report claims that Samsung has finished developing a rollable phone in response to this mysterious Huawei foldable phone.

The rollable prototypes that Samsung unveiled at trade shows are built using the same display technology as their foldable gadgets. A rollable phone, on the other hand, would have an entirely different form factor than a single- or dual-folding phone.

However, according to some sources, Samsung may postpone its plans for a rollable phone in favor of releasing a dual-folding phone that looks like Huawei’s.

Regardless, here’s an additional piece of information regarding the worldwide foldable phone market in 2024 that may come as a greater surprise than Huawei and Samsung’s pursuit of novel form factors:

In 2024, Oppo and Vivo will exit the foldable phone market:

The same report claims that Oppo and Vivo, two significant Chinese smartphone manufacturers, chose not to pursue the development of foldable phones any further. They’re giving up completely.

Oppo and Vivo have reportedly come to the conclusion that the foldable segment isn’t feasible for them, while Huawei is ready to put all on the line to compete with Samsung in the foldable phone market. In 2023, their market shares fell rapidly, and they might not see a path back.

In 2023, Samsung dominated the foldable phone market every quarter by a wide margin. Thanks to its market position in China, Huawei was the second-largest manufacturer of foldable phones; yet, many other OEMs, such as Oppo and Vivo, were barely apparent.

Samsung appears to have mastered the single-fold category, as evidenced by the popularity of the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5.