(Yicai Global) Feb. 25 -- Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei Technologies debuted its new Mate Xs folding handset, which is priced at EUR2,499 (USD2,712), at a pre-recorded online launch ceremony yesterday. 

This next-generation smartphone will land on global markets next month, with pre-sales set to begin tomorrow. 

Huawei Mate Xs features its Kirin 990 chip, which has eight gigabytes of random-access memory and 512 gigabytes of read-only memory, said Yu Chengdong, chief executive at the Shenzhen-based consumer electronics maker's consumer business group.

Huawei safeguarded its reputation as the world's second-largest smartphone vendor last year, notwithstanding US government efforts to ban it from using Google's Android operating system in its mobile devices.

The company also introduced its self-developed Huawei Mobile Services terminal cloud service, which has already come online in more than 170 countries and has about 400 million monthly active users, Yu also noted, adding Huawei will collaborate with local application developers to offer its users a better experience.

The US government ban also made Huawei unable to use Google Mobile Services -- including Google's mail system, maps, search engines, application stores and YouTube -- when it debuted its new flagship Huawei Mate 30 series in Munich, Germany in September, at which time Yu said the company was to come out with its own mobile services.

The firm projects its last year's business revenue at CNY850 billion (USD121 billion) for an annual 18 percent rise, according to Yu

Editor: Ben Armour