HiSilicon wants to develop best chips and will not lay off employees even if cannot make new chipsets: Huawei Semiconductor Division

According to the latest global smartphone chipset report shared by Strategy Analytics, the smartphone processor market has been recorded a year-on-year increase of 21% for the first quarter of 2021.

The market revenue reached 6.8 billion US dollars but Huawei‘s chip designing subsidiary – HiSilicon shows 88% of the decline in the shipment units in comparison with the same quarter of the last year.

Speculation on this matter is being made that Huawei will lay off its employees in the face of the current decline but Huawei has refuted these rumors.

According to Nikkei Asia, Senior Vice President and Director of the Huawei Board, Catherine Chen stated that HiSilicon is still working on the semiconductor technology and researching new chips. She also said, there is no plan to reshuffle or remove the staff or project, even if HiSilicon doesn’t make new chips.

Elaborating this, she informed that the HiSiliocn division has about 7,000 apprentices by the end of 2020, and it’s a financial challenge for Huawei to keep them as a part of the company. However, as an independent company, Huawei isn’t stirred by the current hurdles.

Moreover, she also announced that Huawei has decided to keep HiSilicon and will move forwards with continued researchers and development. Catherin expects that one day, HiSilicon will make a breakthrough and get its position back in the semiconductor world.

Talking about HiSilicon, it’s a semiconductors company, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huawei. It provides its services related to smart vision, smart IoT, display interactions, mobile SoCs, data centers, and optical transceivers.

After the U.S. sanctions, Huawei is blacklisted and refrained from accessing the U.S. based technologies including the permission to print new chipsets designed by HiSilicon.

Previously, the rotating chairman of the company, Eric Xu also announced during 2021 HAS that Huawei’s chip designing department, HiSilicon, is not contributing to the company’s earnings. (Read Here)

The only aim of the division is to research new technologies and the company will support them as long as the conditions will be in Huawei’s favor.