You’ve probably heard about the US blacklisting of Huawei by now. If you haven’t, here’s a brief summary for you. The President of the United States issued an executive order that restricted American companies from supplying products to Huawei. In a few days many companies like Google, Qualcomm, Infineon and Intel had already severed their ties with Huawei. This meant that Huawei couldn’t pair its future smartphones with Android or Google services. It couldn’t include any Intel hardware in its laptops either. While the suspension date of Google’s services to Huawei has been postponed by 90 days, the fact that the company might be on its last breaths still remains true in the eyes of many people. The story isn’t that simple though. There are many factors involved in the whole controversy.
People in America are still extremely apprehensive about the whole thing. They do genuinely believe that Huawei has been sending their data to the Chinese Government. This fact has also been testified by intelligence and security agencies of many countries. So, the ban seems to become somewhat understandable until you realise that the US and China are basically engaged in a trade war. There is a lot to lose when it comes to business on such a massive scale. Huawei developing some new revolutionary tech like 5G before an American company could result in billions of dollars lost by the American businesses. A country would never want its main trade rival to step into its territory and earn profits there. So, the ban can then be seen under this light as well. However, which side of the story is true is still up in the air and your guess is as good as mine.
Read the full story on the Huawei ban here
People are protesting against the ban
The thing with Huawei is that no matter what anyone says, it is still the 2nd biggest smartphone manufacturer in the whole world. There are millions of people who own and use Huawei devices on a daily basis and for good reason. The company makes some of the best in class devices for both top tier flagship range and mid-range/budget options. This has obviously led to a lot of people becoming loyal to a brand like Huawei. Huawei’s CFO was arrested a few months ago in Canada for breaking US Sanctions which was when the whole thing basically took off. The unrest meant that most of the Huawei followers started protesting against the ban by buying company’s devices and destroying their other phones. For example, in China, people have actually started to break iPhones in protest of the ban.
Chinese people are destroying their iPhones ? pic.twitter.com/qgxA9uPRS0
— ??? ??????? ??? ?? ??????? (@BusinessmanWiz) May 22, 2019
In other news, even some diplomats are coming out in Chinese support. A lot of people have been joking about the fact that the Huawei logo looks like a sliced Apple. This signifies that Huawei tore Apple into pieces and Apple, not being able to take defeat, initiated the movement for Huawei’s ban. Huawei has already overtaken Apple and has shown an impressive 50% growth as compared to last year. While taking a jab at Apple and talking about the ban, a Chinese diplomat tweeted the picture in which the Huawei logo looks like an Apple. However, he forgot that he had made this tweet using an iPhone which made the thing look even funnier.
BREAKING: It has been just revealed why @realDonaldTrump hated a private company from China so much that it went so far by announcing a national emergency. Look at the logo of Huawei. It has cut APPLE into pieces… pic.twitter.com/KOXstlAsja
— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) May 20, 2019
In another tweet, he stated that the reason Apple is so afraid of Huawei is because the company has introduced a revolutionary 30x optical zoom feature in their latest flagship, the P30 Pro.
Why is Huawei making America tremble and go insane? Huawei's new phone camera's optical zoom is just insane. pic.twitter.com/tESGjR83U7
— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) May 20, 2019
ARM has stopped supplies to Huawei
All these protests aside, a really serious news broke out earlier today about the whole debacle. According to BBC News, ARM has decided to cut ties with Huawei as well. US companies not supplying Huawei makes sense but ARM is a UK based company. So, clearly the effect of the US ban is not limited to American companies. This is a massive blow to Huawei’s aspirations as ARM is one of the most important suppliers for any smartphone company. ARM develops the chip architecture designs for pretty much all of the smartphone chipsets. This means that Huawei would not even be able to manufacture processors through its own HiSilicon company since HiSilicon chips use ARM architecture as well.
Since Qualcomm has stopped business with Huawei as well, this has put the company in an extremely tight spot and getting out of it seems like it would be a real struggle. Yes, they could resort to someone like Mediatek but then Mediatek uses ARM architecture as well so we don’t know if Mediatek could supply processors to Huawei either. Even if it could, Mediatek processors are nowhere near as good as the ones made by Qualcomm or HiSilicon so Huawei is bound to suffer in any case. I don’t see how Huawei could come out of this one unscathed and it could potentially mean the end of Huawei as we know it. Even if it doesn’t totally destroy the company’s aspirations, it will still end up being a pretty major blow and Huawei is bound to suffer as a result of it.