Huawei Admits Struggling After the US Ban
The Huawei’s consumer business CEO, Richard Yu has said that the company is struggling to procure in smartphone business since the US government started its restrictions. Trump’s administration has been criticizing Huawei for being a Chinese spy and posed as a national threat for security. Thus, it had put the company into an entity list, thereby barring it from US technologies. Since then, any US company that plans to deal with Huawei or vice-versa has to take a special trading license from the US government. This made many companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom, and even Google, which made pulled down the productivity of several Huawei phones released after the ban. Richard Yu said in the 2020 Summit of China Information Technology Association that, September 15 is when the US companies would stop transacting with, making it difficult for the company to find a chip supplier. The US government has dictated TSMC, the Kirin chips producer for Huawei to stop supplying it by September 15. This makes the Huawei end receiving any chips from TSMC after that. Thus, the Kirin’s latest 9000 chips will be the last one to be produced, as high-end, and becoming to Mate 40 handsets. The flagship series is scheduled to be launched sometime in October this year and will be limited by stock. With TSMC stepping down as the producer, Huawei will be left with two options as either South Korea’s Samsung or Chinese SMIC. Thought the former is capable of going almost equivalent to TSMC, it may not come supportive to Huawei fearing the same fate from the US. Thus, Huawei should be relying on the Chinese native foundry, SMIC to manufacture the Kirin chips. Though SMIC produced 14nm chips to Huawei earlier this year, it’s still a couple of generations behind what TSMC is upto. Thus, it takes time for SMIC to become a reliable producer for Huawei.
