Huawei’s mockery of Apple over 5G chip sourcing didn’t age well

“In April, Huawei’s founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei suggested to CNBC that if Apple continued to be unable to source 5G technology from Qualcomm, Huawei ‘would be open to’ selling its own 5G models to the iPhone maker,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for Roughly Drafted. “Yet a week after repeatedly leading the media along with the idea that it was going to “rescue” Apple from its 5G problems, Huawei admitted to Reuters that it hadn’t even discussed the possibility with Apple.”
“Instead, the remarks were pretty clearly made to suggest that Huawei’s chip technology was advanced far ahead of Apple’s, and that iPhones were in a precarious position teetering on the precipice of doom where only Huawei offered it any hope of survival,” Dilger writes. “The reality is that Huawei’s Application Processor chips are well behind Apple’s and the company is greatly reliant on a variety of U.S. companies as suppliers.”
“Two months later, while Apple has resolved its legal issues with Qualcomm, it’s now Huawei that is blocked from using American suppliers including Qualcomm, due to the Trump Administration’s listing of Huawei on the ‘Entity List,'” Dilger writes. “American companies now have to apply for a license before shipping their products to the Chinese company.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, as the screws tighten on China, a new U.S.-China trade agreement is near!
In closing his article, Dilger makes an important point:
Some have sought to portray Huawei’s problems as being just another issue for Apple, imagining that the Chinese government would snub the American iPhone maker in retaliation. However, China’s increasingly sophisticated supply chain and a series of its major manufacturers are dependent upon Apple’s contract manufacturing business because of its ability to sell premium products at high volumes. Further, China itself collects a Value Added Tax on every iPhone sold in the country, making it a partner in Apple’s success domestically as well as globally. — Daniel Eran Dilger, Roughly Drafted, May 20, 2019
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