After the Huawei P40 was disassembled, it was found that US-made components were used. Its RF front-end modules were mainly from three American chip companies-Qualcomm, Skyworks and Qorvo, according to the Financial Times report.
The dismantling was mainly completed by a domestic company called "XYZone". For comparison, the company also dismantled the Huawei P30 released in 2019.
It is worth noting that mobile phone manufacturers sometimes use different components in different batches of the same batch of smartphones. The disassembled mobile phone is the earliest released P40 version.
From the disassembly results, the parts of Huawei P40 include Sony lens, LG display panel, NXP's NFC chip, Samsung's flash memory, Desay's battery, Hisilicon chip, and NXP's near field communication chip, mainly from China and Japan, South Korea and other places.
However, there are still a small number of parts from the United States, mainly RF front-end modules.
However, compared to the component composition of Huawei P30, P40 has relatively reduced the use of US parts, mainly reflected in the memory, communications and RF chip sections.
"Huawei has shown resilience by replacing many US components over the course of a single phone-design cycle. Its continued use of Qorvo and Skyworks chips also shows that it's too difficult to break dependence on US technology," said Dan Wang, technology analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics.
RF front-end modules are a form of analogue chip, a sector in which the US still has dominance, Mr Wang said. "As the US debates tightening sanctions on Huawei, the company's resilience will be tested more severely in the coming year," he added.
In fact, since the United States listed Huawei in the regulated "entity list" in May 2019, a series of repressions have begun. First, Google was prohibited from providing GMS services to Huawei, and then it was reported that it was preparing to supply Huawei with global chips (such as Speaking of TSMC) news of the implementation of restrictions. For Huawei, the impact is not small.
The most obvious of these is the change in income. According to the annual report data, Huawei's net profit in 2019 reached 62.7 billion yuan, an increase of 5.6% year-on-year; and the year-on-year increase in 2018 was 25.1%.
Geographically, the EMEA region only grew by 0.7%, compared with a year-on-year growth rate of 24.3% in 2018; the Asia-Pacific region even experienced a 13.9% revenue decline. It is not difficult to see that Huawei's overseas revenue has been hit. According to the information disclosed by Huawei, the impact of the overseas revenue of the consumer business alone is at least about 10 billion US dollars.
In order to reduce its reliance on the United States, Huawei developed Harmony OS and an open HMS, and there is nothing wrong with reducing the use of American parts.