Chinese giants Huawei were reportedly running out of high-end chips to power their smartphones – this came only a few months ago, prior to the launch of their Mate 40 series, which ran on their Kirin 9000 chipset. If those reports were true, it may seem that next year’s models from Huawei will suffer due to this shortage of processors.
In come Qualcomm, who’s previously spoken publicly of its wants to continue supplying chips to Huawei, despite the trade ban imposed by US President Donald Trump. Qualcomm, being an American company, has purportedly acquired a license to supply hardware to Huawei, which means the Chinese company will probably have next year’s Snapdragon 875 to power their upcoming flagships – namely the Huawei P50 series.
But this was only made possible with Huawei’s talks to sell their HONOR subsidiary for $15.2bil to the Shenzhen government and Digital China, among other potential shareholders. With Huawei offloading Honor, Qualcomm can now comfortably supply their chips to the company as its within their capacity.
HONOR 9A
To further seal the deal, Huawei had also paid Qualcomm $1.8bil as a patent fee to use the Snapdragon chips. On top of that, with Donald Trump on his way out of the White House, things could be on the up for all parties involved as any trade tensions between US and China could be eased with the appointment of President-elect Joe Biden.
It’s interesting times ahead for the tech industry and for us consumers alike – we’ll be sure to keep you updated on the latest happenings in this arena as more information comes.