The recent announcement that the United States has halted new licences for Huawei has generated some alarm in the technology industry. However, Qualcomm, Huawei’s key chip supplier, has come forward to clarify their position on the problem.

During the Q1 2023 earnings call, Alex Rogers, President of Qualcomm Technology Licensing and Global Affairs, stated that the recent changes made by the United States Commerce Department are still unknown to Qualcomm and that they do not anticipate any significant impact on their shipments to Huawei. He explained that Qualcomm already has licences that allow them to supply 4G and other chipset technologies to Huawei, including Wi-Fi. These licences were awarded after the Commerce Department certified that they presented no threat to national security, and they will be valid for several years.

This statement from Qualcomm comes as a comfort to the IT community, since prior reports stated that the US has prohibited Huawei from exporting 4G, Wi-Fi 6, 7, and AI chipsets. Although there are still some unknowns, this is good news for Huawei, which has multiple flagship releases planned for this year, all of which will employ Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ chipsets. Since then, Huawei has been unable to introduce any 5G devices because US regulations have prevented it from obtaining the most advanced semiconductors required to power such devices.

Intel and Qualcomm have made significant inroads into the Chinese market. Unfortunately, the revelation weighed on both prices, as Qualcomm fell 0.9% in premarket trade earlier this week in the United States, with Intel shares following suit and falling 0.9% as well. This outpaces the broader trend in the tech industry, as indicated by the 0.4% drop in the Nasdaq index, which is centred on technology. It’s possible that Huawei has a significant stockpile of Qualcomm processors that will last them a year, but for the time being, this news is positive, and the business will likely issue another statement in due time.

Info source – Gizmo China