Icon: enlarge
Sim card slot on a Huawei mobile phone
Photo: Matthias Kremp / DER SPIEGEL
The Chinese electronics company Huawei has been on a blacklist of the US Department of Commerce for a year and a half.
Since then, American companies have been forbidden to trade with the company, especially: to supply them with their products.
After the regulation had been suspended several times by the USA, a report by the Japanese news website "Nikkei Asia" now shows how badly the previously booming business with Huawei smartphones has been affected.
Accordingly, the company has informed its suppliers that it will order 60 percent fewer components from them this year than in the previous year.
According to "Nikkei Asia" these deliveries should be enough for the production of 70 to 80 million smartphones.
That would be a dramatic decrease compared to the 189 million devices that Huawei shipped in 2020 and only a third of the approximately 240 million smartphones that Huawei was able to bring to the market in 2019, according to Statista.
The company had long been able to keep afloat with stocks of microchips and components that were dumped in good time.
In August, however, Richard Yu, head of the company's entertainment electronics division, warned that the company was in danger of running out of chips.
Although Huawei is developing its own Kirin brand processors for its smartphones, it has so far relied on US technology for their production.
According to IDC market researchers, the company fell from the top position as the world's most successful smartphone manufacturer to second place.
Huawei's market share fell from 20.2 to 14.6 percent.
In addition, at the end of 2020, the group sold its smartphone brand Honor, which was primarily intended to help attract young consumers to Huawei's products.
Honor went to a Chinese consortium of companies.
Chinese hopes that Joe Biden's inauguration as US President would loosen the US line towards China and Chinese companies have not been fulfilled.
Biden had already announced before he took office that he wanted to keep the additional tariffs introduced by Trump on products from China and other measures in the trade conflict for the time being.
After an initial conversation with each other, China's head of state Xi Jinping and Joe Biden emphasized the importance of Sino-American cooperation, but Biden also indicated that the course was unchanged.
This is not good news for Huawei.
Huawei itself has not yet commented on the Nikkei Asia report, nor has it responded to a request from SPIEGEL.
Icon: The mirror
mak
