Editing by Kate Yuan

Chinese smartphone companies including OPPO, Huawei, ZTE, and Xiaomi, showed upand shined at the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC), which opened on February 28 according toXinhua report and other Chinese press reports.

Market research company Counterpoint Research said that seven out of the top ten most popularsmartphone brands in Europe are based in China. Their presence at the MWC seems determined to bring this figure higher.

The MWC was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020,which also caused last year's scaling down. This year, the congress is back with the most products and the participants in the recent three years.

Thomas Herron, Xiaomi Technology's head of communications for western Europe, told Xinhua that his company was "excited to be able to come back and meet people at the MWC."

He said that Xiaomi showcased several products, including its recently launched Redmi Note 11 smartphone.

"Xiaomi has a huge breadth of products, from a cyber dog to our connected ecosystem of AIT products, and our other brand, POCO, is launching two new products here today," he said.

Huawei launched seven smart office products including two personal computers (PCs) in its MateBook series -- the Matebook E with a 12.6-inch OLED display and the X Pro 2022 with a 14-inch display.

It did not release any mobile phones because of  its insufficient chip supply. Richard Yu, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Huawei Consumer Business Group, said he was optimistic about the future, noting that his company had weathered the "hard winter" and was now "looking forward to enjoying the warmth of the spring."

Former Huawei subsidiary Honor, which is now an independent brand, was the only handset maker that officially launched a new flagship mobile phone at the MWC. The newly launched Magic 4 made up for the shortcomings of its predecessors and became one of the focuses of the conference.

According to Honor, the Magic 4 series brings a comprehensive upgrade of technology and experience in performance, display, images, and security.

OPPO highlighted its characteristic charging technology. On February 28, its spinoff brand realme officially announced at MWC that GT Neo3 will be the world's first coming with 150W charging, which can charge the battery up to 50% in just 5 minutes.

At the same time, the first 100W-200W fast-charging architecture——UltraDart Charging Architecture will be launched. The new architecture adopts a new temperature control management mechanism, which can keep the operating temperature below 43°C all the time.

OPPO and its camp OnePlus and realme all use the same 150W fast charging technology, and the new phones equipped with this are likely to be unveiled soon.

Lenovo, TCL, China Telecom, and ZTE are also all present in Barcelona.

"We have seen that the digital transformation is very much ongoing after two years affected by the pandemic," commented David An Wei, ZTE’s chief technology officer of Group Asia.

Chinese companies’  appearance also reflects the fierce competition in the country’s domestic smartphone market, which was quite flat in 2021 and this year may be a critical year to see who can grab the top spot, commented an industry observer.

Audit: WM Zhang