Huawei – 5G non-starter pt. II

No 5G here. 

• Huawei has released its latest flagship product but its hesitancy to disclose the details of the components that it is using highlights again how unfeasible it is for Huawei to manufacture a 5G smartphone.
• Huawei has launched the Mate 60 Pro which looks great but how it performs and what sort of battery life it will offer remain somewhat of a mystery.
• In my opinion, silence is never a good sign, leading me to conclude that this device is not 5G.
• The rest of the device is perfectly respectable with a decent screen and cameras, but Huawei has never had any problem either creating these devices itself or importing components from overseas.
• This is why all of the attention is on its applications processor, its baseband and how much battery life the device will offer.
• It needs to be good if Huawei is going to get any real volume at all.
• This is because the 512GB variant is being offered for presale at a price of $960 putting it up against the rest of the Chinese handset makers who are using the latest Qualcomm and MediaTek chipsets at this price point.
• Huawei refused to comment on whether the Mate 60 Pro supports 5G and there was no mention of radio band support which in my opinion means that it doesn’t have 5G.
• This is supported by the fact that this is a thin and light device whose aesthetics would be badly compromised if it was supporting 5G.
• If Huawei was to go for 5G, I think that the best that it could manage in conjunction with SMIC (see here) would be 5G baseband chips at 14nm, but I suspect that 28nm is more likely given the problems SMIC has been having.
• This means that Huawei’s 5G would be 6-8 generations behind those of MediaTek and Qualcomm which are widely used in all of Huawei’s domestic and international competitors.
• This means that a Huawei 5G smartphone would be fatter, heavier, more expensive with lower performance and shorter battery life as a result of running 5G on a 14nm or 28nm process.
• Consequently, no consumer in his or her right mind would buy a Huawei device over one from Oppo, Vivo, Honor etc. all of whom have access to the most advanced chips.
• This device is not fatter or heavier and as Huawei can’t use 5G chips from either Qualcomm or MediaTek, leads me to conclude that it is not there.
• Most of the evidence also points in this direction as Geekbench scores put this device on a single / multi-core score of 914/2896 which is much lower than the Mate P50 Pro which used Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and had a score of 1266/3938.
• For reference, Samsung’s current flagship S23 Ultra using Snapdragon Gen 2 comes in at 1530/4916 highlighting just how far behind the curve the Mate 60 Pro is.
• Screenshots (see here) identify a Kirin9000s chipset and claim a 5nm process which if true, means that there is no way that this could be a 5G chip.
• This is because Huawei is blocked from buying 5G, leading-edge silicon from TSMC and given, TSMC’s exposure to the US market, it would make no sense for it to breach this regulation.
• Hence, I think that all of the available evidence supports the view that this is not a 5G device and I continue to think that it makes no economic sense for Huawei to return to 5G no matter what the market chatter says.
• All of Huawei’s competitors in smartphones still have access to the latest silicon from Qualcomm and MediaTek and I think it extremely unlikely that Huawei can make a competitive product.
• Hence, there is no reason to think that this device heralds a comeback for Huawei and as such I think it will continue to struggle to recover in the telecom equipment industry and more generally in markets outside of China.