The importance of chips is increasing, but after all, it is still a commodity, and only by entering the market to generate benefits can chip companies form a positive cycle. However, the United States has used the chip as a sanction tool and has repeatedly interfered.
Although this will have a certain impact on our company, the interfered chip companies will also be damaged, and Ren Zhengfei has predicted this. Recently, Ren Zhengfei's prediction is becoming a reality, and the three major chip giants in the United States have begun to act!
For example, the previous US chip ban, stemming from Huawei's 5G global leadership, worried that it will affect people's security, in fact, because of the cheese of others, so it uses chips to restrict, in order to sanction and suppress the development of Chinese enterprises.
First let Qualcomm, Intel and other US companies cut off the supply of 5G and other chips, and then let TSMC stop manufacturing Kirin high-end chips.
This series of operations has indeed had a considerable impact on Huawei, and the mobile phone business has plummeted, and its revenue has also been affected to a certain extent. However, the chip companies that participated in the sanctions as required were also not happy, especially the US companies, which suffered heavy losses.
Since then, the chip problem has become an important problem that Huawei needs to solve urgently. In this regard, Yu Chengdong once said that he regretted not laying out chip manufacturing, and he used to believe too much in the global division of labor, which led to the situation that no cores are available now.
But this is actually not Huawei's problem, Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek are only doing chip design, chip manufacturing to TSMC, Samsung and other wafer manufacturers. Huawei's ability to make chip design world-class is already very difficult.
In addition, chip manufacturing can not be done by one company, but the cooperation of all aspects of the industrial chain is required.
Huawei's original slogan was "to use the world's best components and tools to build the world's best products", so it has always adhered to the global industrial chain. But the United States broke this situation, focusing on chip restrictions.
Ren Zhengfei said in an interview in 2019 that chips are still solved globally, and the chip restrictions of the United States will make the world take chips very seriously, and the world will be an era of excess chips in the future, when there will be people begging us to buy chips.
I didn't expect that the chip surplus came so soon, the chip inventory of US companies is very serious, and the three chip giants have begun to act.
First of all, NVIDIA. Last year, the United States banned the sale of two most advanced chips, A100 and H100, to Chinese companies on security grounds. You know, the more advanced the chip, the higher the profit, and chip companies are using advanced chips to earn more profits.
However, advanced chips were banned from shipments. Of course, NVIDIA will not be willing to be damaged, so it has launched an A800, known as China's special version of the chip, which can replace the restricted export of A100, and meets the new export control regulations of the United States.
It also said it is developing an alternative chip for the H100, the H800, for Chinese companies such as Ali, Baidu and Tencent.
This is followed by Intel. Among the US chip giants, Intel is the most damaged, of course, it is more anxious to clear inventory. The mainland is the world's largest semiconductor market, Intel naturally pays more attention to it, and also launched a special version of the CPU in China.
Similar to NVIDIA, Intel launched two special processors, and also made it clear that these two CPUs face Chinese mainland sales, and this is not a castrated version, but a high configuration, higher processing performance, but cheaper prices.
Intel's aim is to curry favor with Chinese consumers to boost chip sales and ease the pressure of declining performance.
Then there's Qualcomm. Compared with NVIDIA and Intel, Qualcomm is more dependent on the mainland market, and the revenue from the mainland accounts for 67.1%. After the implementation of the US chip ban, Huawei alone lost $8 billion a year.
Although Qualcomm has obtained 4G and other related licenses for shipment to Huawei, chip products such as 5G are now the majority of profits.
But just like that, the United States reported that it would cancel 4G and other licenses. This makes Qualcomm unbearable, because the decline in performance has been very serious, so it directly said at the earnings conference that Huawei's shipments of 4G will not be affected, and the license will be technology for many years.
It can be seen that none of the three major chip giants in the United States wants to give up Chinese customers, because they understand that the mainland is the world's largest semiconductor market. You know, 70% of the world's chips will go to the mainland to go around, and the restrictions will only lose more.
More importantly, the US chip restrictions have aroused our determination to develop chips, and the mainland's chip production capacity has begun to increase rapidly, which will naturally reduce chip imports. Now, the action of the US company has begun to think of letting us buy chips.
Therefore, Ren Zhengfei's prediction about chips is becoming a reality, and the three major chip giants in the United States have begun to act!