The United States is slowly leaving Huawei without options. The ongoing ban is now threatening to leave the company without important display and chip suppliers, as it is now stopping Huawei from doing business with Samsung and LG.
The Huawei ban was already bad when it started back in May 2019, but it is now about to worsen. Huawei has already lost TSMC as its main chip provider, meaning that the upcoming Huawei Mate 40 series will be the last one to include Kirin processors. Now, starting September 15, Huawei will be left without Samsung Display and LG Display as business partners, as these companies are expected to stop shipments because of the latest trade restrictions imposed by the United States.
It seems that the chips used to drive Samsung and LG displays are affected by the new US sanctions; in other words, unless Samsung and LG get the necessary permissions, they will be unable to conduct business with the Chinese tech giant. Both companies are key suppliers for Huawei’s flagship devices, but we will have to see how Huawei manages to keep on going with BOE as its only display supplier, as the company would’ve already started using BOE displays in the new Mate 40.
The display issue may seem critical, but it seems that BOE would ramp up production to meet Huawei’s needs, or the company could also look to other OLED makers such as CSOT and Visionox. However, according to another report from South Korean outlet Chosun Ilbo, Samsung and SK Hynix may also stop selling chipsets to Huawei, which would leave the company without a source of DRAM and NAND flash chips.
These new events may help Samsung keep its crown as the world’s largest smartphone vendor, but it will also affect the South Korean chaebol, as SamMobile’s Mihai M explains:
“This is a considerable loss for Samsung’s semiconductor arm as Huawei was one of its biggest memory chip clients. However, the South Korean tech giant also lost one of its biggest rivals in the mobile industry, so it is sort of a win-lose situation. In any case, it will be interesting to see how Huawei will try to adjust moving forward given that there’s virtually no semiconductor company in the world that doesn’t use any software or equipment obtained from the United States.”
Whatever the case, Huawei has been preparing for these actions for some time, and it had stacked up on chips before these changes took place, since the US Department of Commerce made changes to the original sanctions that didn’t apply to memory chip manufacturers. Now, we will have to see how this evolves, and only time will tell if Huawei will overcome this complicated situation.
Source GSM Arena
Via 9to5Google
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