According to a report by the Nikkei Chinese website on May 15, the United States placed Huawei Technologies on the embargo list, and most commercial transactions with American companies were banned for exactly one year until May 15. What will happen to Huawei’s smartphones after being sanctioned and important components not being sourced from the United States? After dismantling the highest-end mobile phone that represents Huawei’s technical strength, it was found that the utilization rate of Chinese-made components has risen sharply from about 25% to about 42% in terms of value after the sanctions. Meanwhile, U.S.-made components fell from about 11 percent to about 1 percent.

The object of this investigation is the 5G version of Huawei’s new product “Mate30”, the highest-end model. As a new model that supports the next-generation communication standard “5G”, it will be launched globally in the fall of 2019 after the United States began to impose sanctions.

With the cooperation of the Japanese professional survey company Fomalhaut Techno Solutions, the parts removed from the mobile phone were identified, and the manufacturer in which country or region was produced. Then consider the market conditions of the industry, etc., calculate the price of parts and components, and calculate the proportion of procurement in each country and region.

The results show that in the Mate30 5G version, the proportion of Chinese-made components used is 41.8%, which is a full 16.5 percentage points higher than the 4G version of the old model listed before the US sanctions. At the same time, only a very small number of American components, such as glass shells, are left, accounting for 11.2% of the 4G version, accounting for 1.5% of the total, almost disappearing. It can be seen from this that one year after the United States initiated sanctions, Huawei had to significantly adjust its procurement targets.

On the other hand, Huawei has promoted the research and development of parts and components this year, and obviously has internal procurement capabilities. In particular, the chip as a backbone component has achieved remarkable results. Chip subsidiary HiSilicon has been developing a processor (CPU) equivalent to the brain of a mobile phone for Huawei’s main mobile phone.

It was also found that on the new 5G version of the mobile phone, some of the more difficult communication chips also use products developed by HiSilicon. In the past 4G mobile phones, this part of the chip originally used the products of Skyworks Solutions, a large-scale communication chip company in the United States. Now Huawei can conduct research and development on its own.

In particular, 5G mobile phones that can perform high-speed communication, compared with 4G models, need to undertake the design technology of difficult chips for signal transmission and reception everywhere, but Huawei has also overcome difficulties in this regard. This has become one of the reasons for the significant increase in the proportion of Chinese-made components in terms of amount.

Huawei has improved its procurement capabilities through independent research and development, which is very obvious compared to other competitors. For example, Xiaomi, which ranks fourth in global sales, is still not equipped with mobile phones, although it is also promoting its own chip research and development. Its new 5G phones “have to continue to choose (US) Qualcomm products” (Nashiu Shu, former consulting director of British research firm Omdia), and rely almost entirely on Qualcomm.

Most of the other components are also produced in the United States. In Xiaomi’s 5G mobile phones, the proportion of US-made components is 37.8%, which is 12 percentage points higher than that of 4G mobile phones. OPPO and vivo are basically the same situation, which can be said to be completely opposite to Huawei’s parts procurement trend.

In the past year, Huawei has built a procurement system with certain pressure resistance against the US sanctions. However, these are hardware-level content such as components, and there is still a long way to go in terms of software such as operating systems (OS). Huawei has been basically using Google’s “Android” operating system. But problems have also arisen in this regard due to U.S. sanctions.

Android is open source software and its operating system is still available today. But Google’s various applications running in the operating system have been restricted under U.S. sanctions. Therefore, popular applications such as “Gmail”, “Google Search” and “YouTube” are currently unavailable on Huawei’s 5G mobile phones.

Faced with this situation, Huawei is stepping up the development of its own “Hongmeng” operating system. Even so, the lack of access to Google’s popular apps will be a huge obstacle to Huawei’s expansion of global sales. Although it will continue to step up independent research and development in both software and hardware in the future, Huawei still sincerely hopes that the United States will lift sanctions so that it can free up its hands on new product research and development as soon as possible.