An illustration shows a user browsing pre-order information for Huawei’s new folding phone in Suqian, Jiangsu province, China, on September 8, 2024.
Photo | Future Publishing | Getty Images
Huawei is trying to gain an advantage appleApple unveiled its own “tri-fold phone” on Tuesday, teasing the launch of a new iPhone, but one analyst says the company’s chip performance remains a weakness despite recent advances.
Martin Yang, senior emerging technologies analyst at Oppenheimer, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Tuesday that Huawei’s chips are still two to three years behind cutting-edge technology.
The technology gap for systems-on-chips (SoCs), which integrate central processing and cellular connectivity, is “widening.” [Huawei] “We don’t yet have access to processes below 7 nanometers,” Yang said. In chip manufacturing, nanometers refer to the size of transistors on a processor.
The smaller the transistor size, the more we can fit onto a chip, and the greater the level of advancement that can be achieved with chips.
Last year, Huawei Mate 60 SmartphoneThis included advanced 7-nanometer chips made in China.
Chinese companies were able to reach that benchmark faster than many analysts thought possible under U.S. trade restrictions that limit China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology.
This success has allowed Huawei to recapture market share from Apple in China, the world’s largest smartphone market.
But unlike the Mate 50, Huawei hasn’t announced any major chip advancements with its latest phone launch.
Meanwhile, according to Yang, Apple is currently using the second-generation 3-nanometer process, and this year’s phones have already shown a 10% to 15% performance improvement compared to last year’s first-generation 3-nanometer process.
“I don’t think this chip will be a big focus or a big marketing point for Huawei’s phones launching this week,” Yang said.
Instead, the company will likely try to downplay the chip’s disadvantages during the upcoming launch week and instead highlight that its phone is the first tri-fold phone on the market, he added.
Huawei has been accepting pre-orders for its foldable smartphone “Mate XT” since September 7. According to the company, WebsiteAs of Tuesday, the phone had already received more than 3.5 million preorders.
but, Mate 60RSYang said Huawei’s iPhone 8, which was released last year, also saw strong preorders but those didn’t translate into actual sales.
“I think that real-world shipping is [3 million range]” he said.
Navkendar Singh of International Data Corp. said on CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Tuesday that while Huawei has an edge in selling foldable smartphones, the market remains niche due to consumer concerns about price and functionality.
