Huawei, Xiaomi and Apple Enter Foldables the Same Week — the Market Doing the Measuring Just Revised Itself

Huawei, Xiaomi and Apple converged on the foldable phone category within about 48 hours this month. Huawei launched HarmonyOS 7 alongside its second-generation trifold, the Mate XT2 Ultimate Design, on September 7; Xiaomi followed hours later with its first "wide fold" flagship, the Xiaomi 18 Fold; and Apple has scheduled its own event for September 9 without confirming whether a folding iPhone will appear at all. Framing the moment is a single number running through most of the English-language coverage: Counterpoint Research's forecast that Apple will capture 25% of the global foldable market in its debut year, landing in second place behind Samsung.

That 25% figure has proven unusually stable. It appeared in a Counterpoint report published July 21, when the firm had Samsung at 32% and Huawei at 24%. It appears again in the report Counterpoint published September 7 — the one behind this week's headlines — except Samsung's projected share has since climbed to 38% and Huawei's has slipped to 22%. Over six weeks, the same research firm moved two of the three leading forecasts by multiple points each. Apple's number didn't move at all.

No English-language outlet appears to have set the two reports side by side. Coverage of the September 7 update, including detailed breakdowns of Apple's projected 6 million-unit shipment cap, treated the new figures as a fresh baseline rather than a revision of numbers the same firm published six weeks earlier. What explains holding one vendor's share constant while adjusting its two closest rivals by six and two points respectively in under two months isn't addressed in either report.

Both threads point to the same soft spot in this week's coverage: the market-share numbers circulating as settled facts are neither fixed nor fully explained. Reading Counterpoint's own two figures together — the 6 million cap and the 25% share — implies a total market smaller than most coverage lets on, and comparing the firm's two reports shows its rival forecasts moving underneath a headline number that didn't.

There's a second number in the Counterpoint report that goes unremarked in most retellings of the 25% figure: Apple's shipment ceiling for 2026 is capped at 6 million foldable iPhones, tied to constrained early production rather than demand. Divide one by the other — 6 million shipments against a 25% share — and the implied size of the entire 2026 global foldable market comes out to roughly 24 million units. Counterpoint's own release doesn't publish that total; it's an inference from the two figures the firm did publish, not a number the firm has confirmed.

That inferred total puts Apple's headline-grabbing runner-up spot in a different light. Apple isn't projected to reach second place by outselling Huawei or closing on Samsung — it's projected to get there because the pool it's competing in is still small enough that a supply-constrained six million units claims a quarter of it. Counterpoint's own associate director, Liz Lee, ties the ranking explicitly to supply rather than demand, noting that initial availability for Apple's first foldable is expected to be limited during the early production ramp, even as a shorter sales window still leaves room for a second-place finish.

Four things will clarify whether these numbers hold. Apple's September 9 event will show whether a folding iPhone appears at all, and on what terms — nothing about it, including the informal "iPhone Ultra" name circulating in supply-chain reports, is Apple-confirmed. Early sell-through for Huawei's Mate XT2, which opened pre-orders August 31 for a 16GB/1TB variant priced at 23,999 yuan, will separate pre-order enthusiasm from actual activations. Whether Counterpoint revises its absolute 2026 shipment estimate once Apple's real production ramp is visible — the current forecast dates to August — will be the first test of whether these percentages hold. And the firm's separate call for 37% category growth in 2027, driven by Samsung's Z Fold8 and the wider audience Apple's entry is expected to bring, will show whether 2026 was a supply story or the start of a demand one.