Explained: Why Huawei is selling 4G phones in 2023?

Yeah, there are a lot of questions that are circling Huawei this year, there are rumors and reports of 5G return. But there’s one specific that you may wonder is “Why Huawei is selling 4G phones in 2023?” Let’s find out the answer.

2019 and Mate 30

In 2019, the US prohibited Huawei from purchasing technologies made by US companies. This includes chipsets for servers and Google Mobile Services (GMS). Thereafter, the company only launched phones without Google apps such as Play Store and so on.

2020 (Kirin 9000)

Afterward, Huawei still had access to third-party chip makers such as Taiwan’s TSMC. But the U.S. decided to expand its restrictions on the Chinese tech maker and banned overseas chip producers – TSMC and Samsung from printing HiSilicon chips.

Although, it can design new chips with its subsidiary – HiSilicon but it was banned from producing them. At the launch of the Huawei Mate 40 series in late 2020, Huawei officially announced to end of new Kirin chipsets on September 15, 2020.

By sensing the situation, Huawei gathered a big stock of Kirin 9000, the last flagship product. It helped Huawei to launch new 5G phones such as Mate 40, P40 series and Mate X2.

Later on, there was another issue appeared with the RF chip module. It is a critical component, which allows phone to enable 5G networks. RF chip module is sold by US firms and fell under US export rules.

Even with Kirin 9000 in stock, Huawei was restrained from making 5G smartphones and the first example of that came later in 2021.

2021 to 2023:

In July 2021, Huawei unveiled the P50 series. The phone’s initial models were equipped with Kirin 9000 but only with 4G access due to a missing RF module.

After that, the Nova series and other mid-to-budget devices all came with Qualcomm 4G processors. For the past two years, Huawei had been a full-time Snapdragon user. Meanwhile, Mate 50 and P60 also used recent Qualcomm chips but only with 4G.

5G in late 2023?

You may now have an understanding of why Huawei is launching 4G phones in 2023. Still, there’s some hope for the second half of this year. Rumors and reports are everywhere about Huawei relaunching 5G but we’ll have to wait for a solid proof for that.