Huawei CEO, After September 15 No More Kirin Chips
At today’s 2020 Summit of the China Information Technology Association, Huawei Consumer Business CEO Yu Chengdong took the stage to deliver a speech. Yu Chengdong publicly confirmed that due to US sanctions, Huawei’s self-developed Kirin chips will not be manufactured after September 15 and will become a swan song.
If the US ban is not revoked (or even upgraded) in the future, Mate 40 will be the last Huawei flagship phone equipped with a self-developed Kirin processor.
Yu Chengdong revealed that Huawei Mate 40 is equipped with Kirin 9000 chips, or the last generation of high-end chips. Yu Chengdong said that Kirin high-end chips have become “out of print” and cannot be produced in the future.
In his speech, Yu revealed that if there were no U.S. restrictions, Huawei’s mobile phone shipments would have overtaken Samsung’s last year, and it would have been a global leader.
He said we made 240 million mobile phones last year, this year’s volume is likely to be less than this number because this year is the second round of sanctions, we have no way to produce the chip, so it is difficult.
We’ve all been in a shortage phase lately, and Huawei’s phones are out of chips and out of supply, which could cause this year’s shipment to be a little less than 240 million units.
Yu Chengdong said that in the first half of this year, Huawei mobile phone still achieved revenue growth, the reason is that the proportion of high-end products sold higher and higher, there are non-cell phone category also achieved high growth.
At the same time, Yu Chengdong announced in his speech Huawei consumer business first-half results, showing that its sales revenue of 255.8 billion yuan, mobile phone global shipments reached 105 million units.
In 2009, Huawei produced its first mobile phone SoC K3V1, and it has been more than ten years this year. In the past decade, Kirin chips have grown from scratch, and have become excellent, but all of this will be suspended.
Fabless companies like Huawei HiSilicon are only responsible for chip design, and manufacturing needs to be handed over to foundries like TSMC. And TSMC has been affected by the US ban and can no longer provide OEM services for Huawei.
Besides, the speech also mentioned that Huawei’s Mate 40 series in the second half of the year, which will be released in September, will be equipped with a new-generation Kirin chip. This chip should refer to the recently rumored Kirin 5nm chip.
