Huawei’s New ‘Made-In-China’ Smartphone Sources More Chips Locally Amid US Tech War 

With draconian export controls and blacklisting by Washington elites, Chinese tech giant Huawei is still operating and, in fact, producing new high-tech smartphones with components increasingly sourced from domestic suppliers. 

A new teardown analysis by tech repair company iFixit and consultancy TechSearch International, first reported by Reuters, shows Huawei’s Pura 70 Pro has a NAND memory chip sourced domestically from the Chinese telecom equipment maker’s in-house chip unit, HiSilicon. 

iFixit and TechSearch found the Pura 70 handset was operating on a Huawei-made advanced processing chipset called the Kirin 9010. They said the new chip is likely an “improved version” of the advanced chip used by Huawei’s Mate 60 series, which was launched last year to compete with Apple’s iPhone 15 lineup. 

“While we cannot provide an exact percentage, we’d say the domestic component usage is high, and definitely higher than in the Mate 60,” Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown technician, said. 

Mokhtari continued, “This is about self-sufficiency, all of this, everything you see when you open up a smartphone and see whatever are made by Chinese manufacturers, this is all about self-sufficiency,” Mokhtari said.

The central theme is that a worsening tech war between Beijing and Washington pushes Huawei to source more handset components in domestic markets. This is an alarming development for Washington politicians, who have spent several years sanctioning China to prevent them from acquiring high-tech Western chips and chip-making tools, as well as the hope of imploding China’s tech-creating abilities. However, the restrictions are backfiring, as Huawei now manufactures smartphones with more domestically sourced chips than ever.  

Just wait for the day when Chinese state media, such as the Global Times, boasts that Huawei’s phones are made entirely with domestic parts. Given the current trajectory, we believe that day is approaching.

Reuters cited analysts who believe Huawei’s phones are denting iPhone market share in the world’s largest handset market. 

However, since the Pura 70’s components are not entirely sourced domestically, IFixit and TechSearch’s analysis shows South Korean company SK Hynix makes the DRAM chip. 

Given the chip restrictions, SK Hynix told Reuters it had been “strictly complying with the relevant policies since the restrictions against Huawei were announced and has also suspended any transactions with the company since then.”

The analysis showed that the processor used by the Pura 70 Pro was 7 nanometers (nm), similar to the chip used to power the Mate 60. 

“This is significant because news of the 9000S on a 7nm node caused a bit of a panic last year when US lawmakers were confronted with the possibility that the sanctions imposed on Chinese chipmakers might not slow their technological progress after all,” iFixit said.

iFixit continued, “The fact that the 9010 is still a 7nm process chip, and that it’s so close to the 9000S, might seem to suggest that Chinese chip manufacturing has indeed been slowed.”

The re-emergence of Huawei, taking on Apple, has infuriated Washington. There was a report from Bloomberg earlier this week that the US revoked licenses that allowed Huawei to buy semiconductors from Qualcomm and Intel. 

The biggest takeaway: Huawei is on a mission to entirely source components from local suppliers as the tech war between China and the US heats up.