A second phone label could carry HarmonyOS and the Celia assistant beyond Huawei's Mate and Pura buyers in a market where IDC counted a 15.4% shipment drop last quarter.
Huawei now has a second smartphone brand on the calendar. Richard Yu, the company’s executive director and head of its consumer business, said on November 11 that OSTA, known in Chinese as Xingmang (星芒), will make its first public appearance at a launch event on November 20. "One more piece of news to share: OSTA Xingmang, a brand-new Huawei sub-brand, will meet everyone for the first time at this launch event," Yu wrote, according to Kuaikeji.
The confirmation settles the two questions that a trademark filing could not: whether the brand exists and when it arrives. EastFrontier reported last week that Huawei had applied to register OSTA for goods from smartphones to chips, while tipsters linked the name to an unannounced phone line. Huawei has still disclosed nothing about the brand’s positioning, specifications or prices, Jiemian reported, calling Yu’s post the first official confirmation of the name and the date.
The choice is strategic. Yicai Global described OSTA as Huawei’s return to running several phone brands, six years after it sold Honor, and said the label could help Huawei reach mid-range and mass-market buyers as its Mate and Pura lines move further into premium pricing.
A car launch and a phone tag carried the announcement
The November 20 event begins at 2:30 p.m. and is billed as a launch for the Stelato V8, a car sold through Huawei’s HIMA alliance, and for the Xingmang brand, according to IT Home. Yu said the V8 will go on sale there and a Shangjie Z7T bundle will also be shown, Kuaikeji reported, with the phone brand added as a further item on the program.
The first device name surfaced the same morning. Jiemian reported that the tag on Yu’s Weibo posts changed from "Huawei Mate 90 RS" to "OSTA O1 Pro", the model that tipsters had described as the brand’s first wide-format phone. An official OSTA Xingmang Weibo account went live and was verified the same day, showing the OSTA logo but no product posts. Accounts with similar names on Douyin and Xiaohongshu were unverified.
TechNode noted that the name and date became official only days after reports of the trademark application. Earlier leaks cited by IT Home in a separate report give the O1 Pro three colors and memory options from 12GB with 256GB of storage to 16GB with 1TB.
Reports point in two directions on price
The brand’s market position is the open question, and the reporting splits. Yicai Global’s mid-range framing sits against claims that the first phones will be anything but cheap. In a later Kuaikeji report, the Weibo blogger 数码闲聊站 said the new phones will match Huawei’s flagship specifications and will not be priced low, while a Huawei store employee said rising chip and memory prices this year mean OSTA products are not expected to be inexpensive. The same employee said stores had received no notice that OSTA products would be sold offline.
Supply also looks tight. Jiemian cited the STAR Market Daily, which quoted industry sources saying the first product is indeed a wide bar phone and that the first batch of stock is small. Wide bar phones use a screen ratio of about 16:9.5 instead of the usual 19.5:9 or 20:9. Huawei already sells one: the Pura X View, launched on September 9 at 5,999 yuan, sold more than 180,000 units on its first day of sales and logged about 282,000 activations in its first week, Jiemian said. Kuaikeji expects the O1 Pro to be priced more accessibly than the Pura X View.
AI is the other selling point in early reports. Yicai Global said market reports expect a Kirin 9-series processor, HarmonyOS and advanced AI functions, possibly including Huawei’s Celia assistant working across apps. ByteDance and ZTE’s Nubia launched a phone earlier this year with the Doubao Phone Assistant, which can operate apps for users.
A shrinking market favors the brand that is growing
Huawei is adding a brand from a position of strength in a falling market. IDC data cited by Jiemian put China’s third-quarter smartphone shipments at about 57.9 million units, down 15.4% from a year earlier. Huawei held 21.1% of China’s smartphone market in the third quarter and was the only major vendor whose shipments grew, up 17.3%, according to IDC data cited by Jiemian. Omdia counted 59.3 million units, the lowest third quarter since 2013.
Rivals are moving toward the same screen shape. Jiemian cited leaks that OPPO has a 16:9 wide-format prototype, Xiaomi is evaluating the format and vivo is testing it. IDC forecasts 147 million new-generation AI phones in China this year, up 31.6%.
The November 20 event should answer what the announcement left open: the O1 Pro’s price against the Pura X View’s 5,999 yuan, whether OSTA phones reach Huawei’s physical stores, and whether Celia ships on the new brand from day one.