New Huawei Kirin chip to impact Qualcomm Snapdragon

Recently, Huawei has returned with its Kirin chipsets and an industry analyst suggests that this new chip will leave an impact on Qualcomm Snapdragon business.

Industry supply chain veteran, Ming-Chi Kuo is saying that Huawei is likely to shift its focus entirely to Kirin by 2024. This year may also mark a decline in Qualcomm chips.

In terms of numbers, Huawei purchased about 23-25 million and 40-42 million mobile chips from Qualcomm for the years 2022 and 2023 respectively. These numbers are quite high given the fact that the company has solely relied on Qualcomm for the past mobile chip shipments.

Kuo observes that Qualcomm may not only lose Huawei as a client but also turn it into a competitor for non-Huawei brands in China.

Currently, the chip seller is projected to ship about 50-60 million units to Chinese smartphone brands. This is lower than in 2023 due to Huawei’s shift towards Kirin. It’s also predicted that the market condition could get even worse for Qualcomm in the following year, as its shipments may continue to decline.

Not only Huawei but Samsung and Apple are also posing a risk to Qualcomm with their future plans. The South Korean company is planning to bring its own chipset – Exynos 2400 to flagship devices. Kuo noted that Samsung will increase the share of the Exynos chip in the upcoming flagship over Snapdragon.

Why it’s more interesting? Because Samsung launched Galaxy S23 devices only with Qualcomm chipset.

In Apple’s matter, the iPhone maker is already using its own Bionic chip but it has to do business with Qualcomm to fetch the modem. Therefore, the company is reportedly working on its own modem chip, which could come into action by 2025.

Huawei and Qualcomm:

In 2019, the US restricted Huawei from buying US technologies. Following that year, Qualcomm applied for a license to sell chipsets to Huawei. But, it only received permission to ship 4G chipsets For the last two years, Huawei has been launching 4G only smartphones.

But the Huawei Mate 60 series broke the barriers and regained 5G access thanks to the new Kirin chipset. Meanwhile, we should not draw the conclusion that Huawei brought the new Kirin chip to impact the shipment of Qualcomm. But it’s more a new life to Huawei smartphones and helped the firm reclaim competitiveness in the market.

(source)