If you pay attention to Huawei's friends, you should all know that since TSMC cut off its supply to Huawei, Huawei has smashed 12 million chip orders to MediaTek. With the escalation of the ban in the United States in mid-August, the chips produced by MediaTek for Huawei could not be shipped normally, and the produced chips were stranded in the warehouse. Because there is no price advantage when MediaTek and Qualcomm compete, if MediaTek's chips want to be sold to other domestic brands, they must be treated at a lower price.
Qualcomm is now the main supplier of 5G chips for most domestic brands such as Xiaomi, vivo and OPPO, and more than 7% of orders in MediaTek are from this Huawei order. Therefore, it is estimated that this year's shipments from MediaTek will not offset the huge loss of Huawei's orders.
According to Guo Ming's speculation, there are only two results after Huawei's ban came into effect. One is that no supplier can provide Huawei with system chips; Second, only Qualcomm can provide Huawei with system chips. This means that the ultimate goal of the United States to sanction Huawei by adding it to the entity list is actually to make Huawei completely abandon its self-developed HiSilicon Kirin series chips and use chips made in Qualcomm like other domestic mobile phone brands. If the plan of the United States is really like this, it will invisibly bring a huge order to Qualcomm. Of course, Huawei, which lost its self-developed chip, may not be so personalized in mobile phone performance, and may also cause instability in sales in the short term, but in the long run, it will be beneficial to Huawei's future development.
At the end of July, 2, Qualcomm reached a long-term cooperation agreement with Huawei, which authorized Huawei to use the patented technology of our company. It is reported that Intel's financial statements in August show that it is still supplying Huawei, including consumer processors and server processor chips. In August, 22, at the launch conference of Huawei MateBook series, all the computers in this series were equipped with Intel's i3, i5 and i7 processor chips, which can also be regarded as a sign.
It is reported that Qualcomm is still lobbying the U.S. Department of Commerce to lift the restrictions on the company's chip sales to Huawei. If Huawei Kirin is out of print and Qualcomm supplies chips to Huawei, according to Huawei's annual smartphone shipments, it can be roughly estimated that Qualcomm will get about $8 billion in orders every year. However, if Huawei is not supplied by Qualcomm, can it survive?
Recently, China has also taken action. The president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said that we will turn the list of American bottlenecks into a list of future scientific research tasks for layout. Therefore, in the next at least 3-5 years, low-priced mobile phones of domestic brands will begin to use domestic system chips one after another, which will greatly stimulate the development of the industry according to the market demand. Of course, it also includes mask aligner's research and development work in the field of chip manufacturing.
According to related reports, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has set up a leading group to tackle key technical problems, and requires everyone who undertakes major tasks to sign a letter of responsibility. Because Huawei-led enterprises have accelerated the process of beautification, China is expected to form a 4nm production line without American technology in a short time. In this way, mask aligner's breakthrough should mainly focus on extreme ultraviolet lithography-type mask aligner, aiming at breaking through more advanced manufacturing processes.
mask aligner is not enough. After all, both Samsung and Intel have advanced mask aligner, but their production capacity and yield are not as good as TSMC's. Of course, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has also made a major breakthrough in chip manufacturing capacity and yield. Last year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a technical breakthrough in the manufacture of 2nm chips, and it became the first institution in the world to adopt the stacked vertical nano-ring gate transistor technology with self-aligned gates.
China has begun to speed up the beautification of the road of self-developed production. As far as the current situation is concerned, this is the only way to solve Huawei's predicament. In the long run, perhaps without Qualcomm's supply, with the increase of scientific research in China, the United States will not be able to stop the rise of China's future chip industry.