It’s no surprise that Huawei, which was at one point the biggest in the world is now not even in the top five smartphone makers. The devastation that US trade restrictions have brought upon the Chinese OEM has crippled its global ambitions, which the brand’s been trying to overcome with its in-house processor and its own Google Play alternative. Since the ploy has not really favored Huawei’s bravado, it is reportedly planning to license out its smartphones to third-party vendors to fill the void.
In a report from Bloomberg, Huawei is reaching out to partners with its handsets who can attain access to the critical components that the trade restriction limits it from having. The first partnership may be planned with China Postal and Telecommunications Appliances Co. unit called Xnova, which is reportedly selling Huawei branded Nova phones already.
A partnership would allow Xnova to solidify its approach and bring to market Huawei designed handset with off-the-shelf Qualcomm and MediaTek processors. Chinese telco TD Tech Ltd. is another brand that would be selling phones featuring Huawei’s designs under self-branding, Bloomberg sites.
From an outside perspective, this could be a nice ploy from Huawei to work around the sanctions that restrict the company’s smartphone business access to American firms including Google, and chipmakers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Qualcomm. With these partnerships, Huawei foresees shipment of more than 30 million smartphones – both in-house and from partners – by end of next year.
According to Chief Executive Officer George Zhao, this idea of partners sprung up after the company sold its sub-brand Honor to free it up from US trade restrictions. To give more impetus to the planning, Huawei engineers are already “redesigning the circuits” of some of its handsets to “adapt to Qualcomm and MediaTek” offerings, sources tell Bloomberg.
