Despite the disruption brought to smart phone sales by the pneumonia outbreak, mobile phone manufacturers have shown optimism in the market for 2020 by recently launching their latest 5G models.

(Xinhua/Han Yan)

Chinese tech giant Huawei introduced its 5G Mate Xs phone with foldable screen on Feb. 24, which is priced at 16,999 yuan in the Chinese market and will be available from March 5.

Smart phone sales may suffer a sharp decline in the first quarter of the year, but will bounce back in the rest of 2020, said Lei Jun, CEO of the mobile handset brand Xiaomi, which intends to roll out 10 new 5G models in 2020.

Despite the unfavorable environment caused by the epidemic at the beginning of 2020, China will accelerate the construction of its 5G network this year. China’s three major mobile operators, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, will build 550,000 5G base stations this year, with the 5G network covering all prefecture-level cities in China.

China Unicom says the epidemic has not caused it to change plans for 5G construction and it will complete the goals for the whole year in the next three quarters.

Meanwhile, China is also actively seeking to recover its smart phone supply chain. 5G mobile phone shipments reached 5,465,000 units in January, over 25 percent of the whole market.

China Unicom predicted that the mobile phone market scale will be about 330 million units in the entire year, of which about 100 million to 180 million will be 5G mobile phones.