According to the Nikkei Chinese website on May 15, the United States has placed Huawei technology on the embargo list, and most of its commercial transactions with American enterprises have been banned. It is exactly one year since May 15. What will happen to Huawei's smart phones after being sanctioned and important parts cannot be purchased from the United States? After disassembling the most high-end mobile phones representing Huawei's technical strength, it was found that after being sanctioned, the utilization rate of Chinese made parts had risen significantly from about 25% to about 42% in monetary terms. At the same time, the proportion of US made parts fell from about 11% to about 1%.
The object of this survey is the 5G version of Huawei's latest high-end model, "Mate30". As a new model supporting the new generation of communication standard "5G", it will be launched in the world successively in the autumn of 2019 after the United States began sanctions.
With the cooperation of Fomalhaut Techno Solutions, a Japanese professional research company, the components removed from the mobile phone were identified and the manufacturer in which country or region was confirmed. Then, considering the market conditions in the industry, we can calculate the price of parts and components, and calculate the purchase proportion in various countries and regions.
The results show that in Mate30 5G version, the proportion of Chinese parts used is 41.8%, which is 16.5 percentage points higher than the 4G version of the old model launched before the US sanctions. At the same time, only a few American parts, such as glass shells, accounted for 11.2% of the 4G version, accounting for 1.5% of the total, almost disappeared. It can be seen from this that one year after the United States launched sanctions, Huawei had to significantly adjust its procurement target.
On the other hand, Huawei has promoted the research and development of parts in this year, and obviously has the ability of internal procurement. In particular, chips as backbone components have achieved remarkable results. Hisense Semiconductor, a chip subsidiary, has been developing processors (CPUs) that are equivalent to mobile phone brains for Huawei's main mobile phones.
In addition, it was also found that on the new 5G mobile phone this time, some communication chips with higher difficulty also used products developed by HiSilicon Semiconductor. In the past, on 4G mobile phones, this part of the chip was originally the product of Skyworks Solutions, a large communication chip company in the United States. Now Huawei has been able to carry out research and development independently.
In particular, compared with 4G mobile phones, 5G mobile phones that can carry out high-speed communication need to undertake the design technology of difficult chips for signal receiving and transmitting everywhere. However, Huawei has also overcome the difficulties in this regard. This is one of the reasons for the substantial increase in the proportion of Chinese made parts in terms of amount.
Huawei improves its purchasing ability through independent research and development, which is very obvious compared with other competitors. For example, Xiaomi, which ranks fourth in global sales, has not yet been equipped with mobile phones, although it is also promoting its own chip research and development. Its new 5G mobile phone "has to continue to choose (the United States) high pass "(former Naxiu Tree, consulting director of Omdia, a British research company), almost all rely on Qualcomm.
Other parts are also mostly made in the United States. In Xiaomi's 5G mobile phones, the proportion of parts made in the United States is 37.8%, which is 12 percentage points higher than that of 4G mobile phones. OPPO and vivo are basically the same, which can be said to be completely opposite to Huawei's parts procurement trend.
Huawei's sanctions against the United States during this year have built a procurement system with certain pressure resistance. However, these are all hardware level contents such as parts, and there is still a long way to go in terms of operating system (OS) and other software. Huawei has been basically using Google "Android" operating system. However, there are also problems in this regard due to US sanctions.
Android is open source software, and its operating system is still available. However, Google's various applications running in the operating system have become restricted objects under US sanctions. Therefore, "Gmail", "Google Search", "YouTube" and other popular applications are currently unavailable on Huawei's 5G mobile phones.
Faced with this situation, Huawei is stepping up the research and development of its own "Hongmeng" operating system. Even so, if Google's popular application software cannot be used, it will form a huge obstacle for Huawei to expand its global sales. Although Huawei will continue to accelerate its independent research and development in both software and hardware in the future, Huawei still sincerely hopes that the United States will lift sanctions in order to make a contribution to the research and development of new products as soon as possible.
