Yesterday we published an edition of the Huawei Corporate deathwatch, not the first and unfortunately not the last.
While we all hope more than anything that all this blows over, and before too long it is business as usual for Huawei, the current situation is going from bad to worse.
No SD for you!
Overnight the SD Association has removed Huawei from its list of consortium members which in itself is really more symbolic than anything, with Huawei easily able to add more storage to phones without having to worry about SD cards. Remember Huawei also introduced a proprietary card into their phones late last year — the NM cards.
The SD Association has its headquarters in California and as such is unable to licence their products to Huawei thanks to the US government’s recent actions.
Some Asian telcos have decided not to sell Huawei phones
Some Asian carriers have suspended sales of Huawei phones indefinitely including Japan’s largest telco, NTT Docomo Inc. NTT Docomo Inc has suspended orders of the entire Huawei P30 series, a move mirrored by rivals KDDI Corp. and YMobile. Note that these are suspensions and postponements, with all companies seemingly just watching this space to see how it develops.
Taiwanese telco Chunghwa Telecom has also decided to not launch the new Huawei series and apparently many other telcos are watching and waiting with many expected to follow suit very soon.
It does make you wonder when the Australian telcos will make a comment on this. There is nothing wrong with Huawei’s current crop of phones, so there is no reason to not sell them, although updates may be a struggle going forward.
No more Honor for Huawei
Huawei were all set to release the new Honor 20 Pro, the new flagship of Huawei’s sub-brand and even just had the launch a few days ago. Now it has been released, and luckily only just received Google certification in time.
The problem now is that many telcos are hesitant to stock it with values of Huawei phone falling significantly in recent days as users attempt to offload them.
But it’s not all bad news
Even though ARM cut off their current relationship with Huawei, the company that makes the Huawei Kirin chipsets, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, has stated that it believes it can continue business with Huawei. Apparently they are confident that them selling to Huawei does not violate the US ban because the amount of US technology in the product is less than the 25% required to trigger the ban.
What does this mean for Huawei?
In the long term the situation does indeed look dire for Huawei, but short term analysts are expecting their sales to decline 24% YoY for 2019 and 23% for next year. You would expect that if sales follows this trend that Huawei will struggle to survive in the long term.
At this stage we are yet to hear of any Australian companies pulling Huawei products from sale and we hope they don’t. No Huawei means less competition and we would lose one of the very few manufacturers that truly innovate in this space.
At this stage with the wheels coming off the Huawei bus so quickly you would expect the Chinese government to step in somehow and either negotiate for Huawei or respond in kind. For Huawei’s sake we hope something is done to remedy the situation very soon.
I recently got the P30 Pro on contract through Optus and am wondering.. if this ban stays and that means Huawei will have issue with possible security and software updates. Would that be a good enough case to request a phone change with telcos? Not that I want too, The P30 Pro is an incredible phone.
I hope Chinese government can ban Apple
I wouldn’t mind Huawei leave the market as long as One Plus and Xiaomi come to Australia.