China's Huawei Poised To Overcome US Ban With Return of 5G Phones (reuters.com) 39
China's Huawei is plotting a return to the 5G smartphone industry by the end of this year, according to research firms, signalling a comeback after a U.S. ban on equipment sales decimated its consumer electronics business. From a report: Huawei should be able to procure 5G chips domestically using its own advances in semiconductor design tools along with chipmaking from Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC), three third-party technology research firms covering China's smartphone sector told Reuters.
The firms, citing industry sources including Huawei suppliers, spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements with clients. A return to the 5G phone market would mark a victory for the company that for almost three years said it was in "survival" mode. Huawei's consumer business revenue peaked at 483 billion yuan ($67 billion) in 2020, before plummeting by almost 50% a year later. The Shenzhen-based tech giant once vied with Apple and Samsung to be the world's biggest handset maker until rounds of U.S. restrictions beginning in 2019 cut its access to chipmaking tools essential for producing its most advanced models.
The firms, citing industry sources including Huawei suppliers, spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements with clients. A return to the 5G phone market would mark a victory for the company that for almost three years said it was in "survival" mode. Huawei's consumer business revenue peaked at 483 billion yuan ($67 billion) in 2020, before plummeting by almost 50% a year later. The Shenzhen-based tech giant once vied with Apple and Samsung to be the world's biggest handset maker until rounds of U.S. restrictions beginning in 2019 cut its access to chipmaking tools essential for producing its most advanced models.
low margins (Score:1)
Re:low margins (Score:5, Interesting)
High-margin semicon requires cutting edge fab tech and billions in r&d. Huawei has never really been competitive in that area except briefly when their reference ARM designs were within spitting distance of other ARM solutions on the market.
SMIC is not going to enable them to compete even with Ampere, much less Amazon's Graviton products. And they probably can't get a license to newer ARM tech.
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SMIC is not going to enable them to compete even with Ampere, much less Amazon's Graviton products. And they probably can't get a license to newer ARM tech.
What does Ampere and Gravitron have to do with making a 5G smartphone. I ask because TFA talks SPECIFICALLY about Huawei's CONSUMER ELECTRONICS DIVISION. Not servers and the like.
And yes, the can (and have) got new ARM licenses.
https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/... [asiatimes.com]
Full disclosure: I worked for Huawei (in the Telecoms area, not Consumer Electronics), in the late '00s. Not my best employer ever, not my worst employer ever. I have neither simpaty, nor animosity to them.
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I was being generous. Huawei's Kunpeng server lineup was probably the most innovative product they produced before they got hammered by trade embargoes. Their Kirin SoCs were just reference ARM designs. They will get nowhere near Qualcomm or Mediatek with SMIC nodes and an aging ARMv8 license.
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Plus again the discussion revolved around high margin semicon which basically means server/cloud/workstation.
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Huawei has a lifetime licence for ARM v8. Beyond that they will probably move to something else, either RISC V or their own design. I.e. the company being hurt the most by these sanctions is ARM, because now the biggest single consumer of their designs (China) is motivated to ditch them.
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Huawei is already shipping 5.5G equipment too, and will probably be the first to ship 6G infrastructure too. With domestically produced modems too, they can release both the carrier equipment and the handsets to take advantage of it, before anyone else.
It will be interesting to see if Western modems can keep up.
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Isn't the smartphone business a low margin business? Why focus so much on that, instead of developing higher margin solutions?
and why not? low margin business can be hugely more profitable than high margin business, it's just a matter of scale.
plus there are strategic reasons: this tech is simply a necessity going forward, and china had no choice but to overcome being bullied out of the trade. it was obvious that this attempt to hamper their development would backfire because it simply would compel them to accelerate self sufficiency, make them even stronger, and burn up any leverage that the us might have actually had in this sec
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Huawei phones in China aren't considered low tier goods, but rather high tier, similar to Apple products, therefore their margins are much higher.
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Do you think Apple & Samsung are making thin profit margins on their phones? Are they impoverished because they sell low profit margin luxury consumer electronics?
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Individual users buying Huawei phones are at worst only putting their own privacy and security at r
Had three (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Revenges coming for the hypocrite (Score:2)
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It won't matter. (Score:3, Interesting)
India has already blacklisted China... US and EU are going to limit imports to a minimum. Agreement in this is broad.
US and EU production is flooding out of China to anywhere else. Factories are idling throughout the chinese economy as their struggle with DEFLATION.
The people that think this is going back to business as usual have not been paying attention.
Re: It won't matter. (Score:1)
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China will sell to the rest of the world, excluding US and EU. It may come as a news to you but majority of world population does not live in US and EU. EU may one day wake up and stop shooting itself in the foot to please its US masters.
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India is per capita richer... any search for growth on that shows that feature.
As to india being poor, they have a huge population which is the same thing that gets companies interested in selling to china.
Further, if we ignore the third world growth sectors and just focus on the rich first world... china is having problems with that. Its going to be the third world that will be most persuaded by low prices.
As to China selling to the rest of the world, same logic applies to the rest of the world that applie
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India has already blacklisted China... US and EU are going to limit imports to a minimum. Agreement in this is broad.
US and EU production is flooding out of China to anywhere else. Factories are idling throughout the chinese economy as their struggle with DEFLATION.
The people that think this is going back to business as usual have not been paying attention.
Funny thing about India blacklisting some of the China products - they are both in BRICS and BRICS is supposed to be working on easier / free'er trade between it's members.
Wonder how that part will work out. Oh yeah, not to mention the occasional fights with deaths between China and India troops in some of the contested border areas.
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Yeah, its goofy. BRICS has no future.
India, Brazil, and South Africa wanted in because they want loans the IMF won't give them for really pretty reasonable reasons.
Russia and China have imperial ambitions... neither of whom are willing to give out the money on the scale and on the terms these other countries want it at.
Its a laughably incompetent and hopeless gathering of conflicted interests.
What happens when you sanction both china's... (Score:4, Insightful)
... Biggest handset maker and their biggest Foundry... Well exactly this!
SMIC could not be worse off sanctions-wise (i.e. get more sanctions) by fabing Hisilicon chips, and Hisilicon (the semiconductor design arm of Huawei) could not be worse off sanctions-wise (i.e. get more sanctions) by doing business with SMIC.
What you say? Phones need RAM and flash too? Funny you say that, YMTC is sanctioned too, and they make serviceable RAM and flash.
What next? Screns? The chinese already make them? MEMS devices? No biggie.
Re:What happens when you sanction both china's... (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly as predicted, aside from the temporary effect on yearly profits, the main outcome of these sanctions was to accelerate China's development of replacement parts for US products.
biggest issue (Score:2)
For me, is more important to have in a phone Google services than 5G. And the replacement provided by Huawei for Google services are not good enough IMO. I say this as a former happy owner of a Huawei phone.
Ah. (Score:1)