The U.S. revoked Qualcomm and Intel's export licenses to Huawei
"In the May 7, 2024 announcement, Qualcomm received a notice from the U.S. Department of Commerce that it will immediately cancel its license to export 4G and certain other types of integrated circuit products, including Wi-Fi products, to Huawei Equipment Co., Ltd. and its affiliates," Qualcomm clearly wrote in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today. Qualcomm also mentioned in its Form 10-Q filed on May 1 that it expects to no longer receive any product revenue from Huawei after the end of the fiscal year. ”
Intel only said that it would comply with the license of the U.S. Department of Commerce to restrict the export of semiconductor products to China, while Qualcomm proposed in the document that it would stop exporting 4G and wifi-related products to Huawei.
Looking back at Huawei's development history, it can be said that there have been twists and turns. Their self-developed Kirin chips have achieved good results, and products like Mate 60 and P70 are also very popular, and their revenue has increased year by year, and they have even entered the top five in the domestic mobile phone market. At the same time, however, Huawei is also facing increasingly severe sanctions, and their access to high-end chips and foundry chips is becoming narrower and narrower. Now, even the availability of 4G and WiFi products is restricted.
In fact, for Qualcomm, the chip ban is not an accident. As early as September last year, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted this situation, saying that once Huawei's self-developed processor makes a breakthrough, Qualcomm is destined to become the biggest loser. He also predicted that by 2024, Huawei may no longer place orders with Qualcomm. According to Kuo Ming-Chi, Huawei alone has purchased more than 60 million processors from Qualcomm in the past two years.
In 23, Ming-Chi Kuo tweeted his views on Huawei's use of self-developed chips
After Huawei's self-developed processor is on the right track, it has the conditions to remove Qualcomm
Huawei's internal letter "A Letter to Comrades-in-Arms" revealed that they had already set a grand blueprint for the development of chips on the PC side in a battle called the "Battle of Tashan". This high-profile chip family was named Kirin X. In fact, this is not the first time that Huawei has tested the waters in the PC field, as they have already begun to apply Kirin chips to some computer products.
I remember that in 2021, Huawei launched the Qingyun L410 laptop, which is equipped with the famous Kirin 990 chip. This chip is the one that shined on the Huawei Mate 30 series and P40 series phones before. Huawei's move not only demonstrates their deep strength in chip research and development, but also indicates their strategic layout in the PC market. Therefore, Huawei's self-developed chips can no longer rely on Qualcomm's 4G products, and it can only be said that Qualcomm's 4G is useful for the current Huawei, but it is not big.
Replicating Apple's path to ARM
In the face of these challenges, Huawei has not sat still. They plan to fully adopt ARM-based processors for PC and tablet devices, a strategy that is a bit like Apple's use of its own M-series chips on Macbooks. In this way, Huawei hopes to demonstrate its strength. However, Huawei also needs to solve the problem of its own ARM chip production capacity, after all, the demand is not small.
At the moment, there is no exact news about which Huawei products will be equipped with the new Kirin X-series chips. However, observing the development progress of Huawei's HarmonyOS operating system, we have reason to believe that this operating system will be closely connected to the PC side in the future. Only by combining self-developed chips with self-developed systems can we win a place in the highly competitive market, which is a promising development path.
Apple's successful experience has proven the viability of this model. By integrating their own hardware and software, they created the iconic Mac. The Mac series has fully shifted to the ARM architecture, a strategic shift that has given Apple a significant market advantage. It can be inferred that Huawei is likely to take a similar path in its future development strategy, through the deep integration of its own chips and the HarmonyOS system, to achieve more optimized product performance and user experience.