(Yicai) April 18 -- Certain models of Huawei Technologies’ new mobile phone Pura 70, the latest addition to its high-end P series which comes equipped with the firm's own large language model and boasts superior camera performance, sold out in less than a minute on the Chinese smartphone giant’s online store after reaching the shelves this morning.

The Pura 70 Ultra, with the highest configuration, and the mid-range Pura 70 Pro were released at 10 a.m. in both online and brick-and-mortar stores, Huawei’s Consumer Business Group said today.

Both models sold out on the Huawei website in under a minute, Yicai discovered when logging in. A brick-and-mortar dealer told Yicai that he still had the Pura 70 Pro in stock because he added CNY500 (USD69) to the official price.

Another two models, the Pura 70 and the Pura 70 Pro+, will be available from April 22. The cheapest model in the series has a starting price of CNY5,499 (USD760) and the Pura 70 Ultra starts at CNY9,999.

The launch marks the renaming of Huawei’s P series, which has been on the market for 12 years, as Pura, which means ‘pure’ in Spanish.

Huawei stopped releasing new phones for several years after it was added to the so-called Entity List by US authorities over national security concerns in May 2019, which barred US companies from buying its products and from selling it their hardware and software. This caused the firm’s Consumer Business Group’s revenue to more than halve in 2022 to CNY214.5 billion (USD29.6 billion) from the peak of CNY483 billion in 2020.

But the release of the Meta 60 mobile phone in August last year, the latest addition to its high-end M series, helped propel the Consumer Business Group back to growth with revenue of CNY251.5 billion (USD34.7 billion), after three years of declines.

‘The development and shipment pace of Huawei’s smartphones is back on track,’ He Gang, chief operating officer of the Consumer Business Group, said at the time.

Huawei’s mobile phone shipments soared 16.6 percent last year from the year before to around 35 million units, according to market research firm Counterpoint Research. Based on an average price of CNY6,000 (USD828) per phone, the additional 5 million handset sales would have boosted the Shenzhen-based firm’s revenue by CNY30 billion (USD4.1 billion) last year and were the main driving force behind the Consumer Business Group’s return to growth.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor