Huawei is now shipping smartphones with zero US components
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro. [credit: Huawei ]
Huawei is settling into life without the US thanks to the Trump administration's export ban, and so far the company seems to be adapting. According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, Huawei's latest flagship smartphone, the Mate 30, contains zero US parts. The Journal has access to an analysis from UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solutions, which tore apart the phone and found manufacturers for each component.
No US components is an improvement over Huawei's previous flagship, the P30 Pro. We did our own version of this analysis back in May for the P30, where we looked over teardowns for US components. The P30 Pro is Huawei's previous flagship smartphone, and while it was designed and launched before the US export ban, it still didn't have a heavy reliance on US manufacturers. Huawei says it has been working to reduce its reliance on US companies for some time, with Huawei's deputy chairman, Ken Hu, writing in May that "The company has known [a US export ban] could be a possibility for many years. We have invested heavily and made full preparations in a variety of areas, including R&D and business continuity, which will ensure that our business operations will not be greatly affected, even under extreme conditions." So far, Huawei's preparations seem to be working.
On the older P30 Pro, Huawei already had its own SoC, thanks to its HiSilicon chip design division. HiSilicon was also responsible for several smaller chips, like audio, the RF transceiver, power-management, and mid-band 5G chips. From there the P30 components were a whirlwind tour across the world: a display from BoE in China, cameras from Sony in Japan, RAM from SK Hynix in South Korea, an NFC chip from NXP in the Netherlands, and a battery from Huizhou Desay Battery Co. in China. The biggest US components were the flash memory from Micron, LTE antennas from Skyhook and Qorvo, and SMPS (switched-mode power supply) chips from Broadcom.
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