Why Huawei is ignoring the Mate 60 Pro
Huawei has introduced many new products (it even announced an electric car), but has remained silent on its flagship smartphone, the Mate 60 Pro. The phone contains a microchip that could prove a circumvention of American restrictions
That there is something wrong is clear at this point. On Monday Richard Yu, administrator of Huawei's consumer business division, presented a series of new products to the public: tablets, smartwatches, smart TVs, wireless headphones, an operating system compatible with Android, even an electric car (the Luxeed S7, for compete with Tesla's Model S)… but did not show or discuss the Chinese company's flagship device, the Mate 60 Pro smartphone.
The absence greatly surprised users of Weibo, the Chinese social network similar to X, who followed Huawei's event en masse and wondered why nothing was said about the phone, as reported by CNN .
THE MATE 60 PRO PROBLEM
Huawei started selling the Mate 60 Pro in August, without however organizing a launch event and above all without communicating its technical specifications. The smartphone – which the company apparently cannot produce in large numbers – in fact has a problem: it contains a 5G chip that it shouldn't have. The chip in question is a Kirin 9000s , made in China by SMIC , the country's largest semiconductor company. The microprocessor is seven nanometers, a technology to which Huawei should not, in theory, have access due to the restrictions that the United States has imposed on the company since 2019. SMIC has also been subject to restrictions since 2020.
Seven-nanometer technology is not the most advanced microchip technology – Apple's iPhones, for example, contain four-nanometer microchips – but the fact that China has developed the capacity to produce it is still remarkable given American controls on exports.
HUAWEI'S MOTIVATIONS
It is possible that Huawei did not want to show the Mate 60 Pro to the public and discuss its performance so as not to attract even more attention from Washington. Days ago the US Department of Commerce said it was working to obtain more information on the "alleged" 7 nanometer processor underlying the Kirin 9000s chip.
However, Ben Sin, a technology analyst, told CNN that the company "everyone wants to know more about the chip so not talking about it is almost a challenge."
HOW SALES ARE GOING
Huawei is trying to regain market share in the smartphone segment after breaking away from the Honor brand, focusing on higher-end devices. In the second quarter of 2023, the company's sales in China increased 58 percent year-on-year, according to data from Counterpoint Research. In the same period, its market share in China went from 6.9 percent to 11.3 percent and could grow further in 2024. It is possible that the Mate 60 Pro could eat into Apple's sales in China.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/huawei-problema-mate-60-pro/ on Tue, 26 Sep 2023 13:35:43 +0000.