To address its own and country biggest weakness, Huawei must advance its chip manufacturing.

In the semiconductor sector, China is very strong in application and also in design but the biggest weakness is chip manufacturing including equipment and process technology.

Huawei is number 1 technology company by size and revenue in China.
Huawei has Hisilicon designed all kind chips but it doesn't do any manufacturing.
Some people said what about Qualcomm?

No, Huawei cannot afford to be just fabless company like Qualcomm. it will have tough road ahead, being number 1 target by US. US will do whatever possible to bring it down. Huawei currently overly reliance on TSMC is ticking timebomb.

Huawei needs to control its manufacturing like Samsung and Intel. No acutally Huawei needs to go even further than Samsung and Intel. It needs to source its equipment besides manufacturing. process. ASML is highly unreliable.

Huawei needs to take charge of its own destiny from all aspects and leave not a single vulnerable area exposed.

1)Huawei needs to purchase 28nm and 14nm and future process IP from SMIC and start its own fab customized for its own product. SMIC currently cannot handle the volume from many customers and will affect Huawei.

2)Huawei needs to acquire SMEE and use its vast resources to speed up the development of lithography equipment from currently 90nm to something smaller in geometry. SMEE currently got stuck at 90 nm mainly due to lack of resources;funding and talents. Huawei have resources to hep SMEE to breakthrough.

3)Currently Huawei relying on TSMC for the 7nm product but once its starts the various projects concurrently
eventually it weans itself from TSMC


Huawei cannot afford to be a pure fabless company because its now the biggest political target by US. Its relying on others for manufacturing could easily be disrupted.

The most immediate threat on the horizon is when US forcing TSMC dropping Huawei, abit similar to UMC backed out from JHCC or threaten Germany to ban Huawei or risk losing sharing intelligence info. Even thought Huawei is a big customer of TSMC but if US forcing the issue, TSMC would have no choice but capitulate as US can ban US equipment to TSMC or deny TSMC US market.

When that happens, Huawei would have no choice but stop producing the leading edge phone oe product that uses 7nm process and concentrate on products of lesser advancement. Huawei should hedge way from focusing too much on leasing edge phone. And expand into Semiconductor equipment industry and analog Semiconductor components which use advanced nodes than digital chips.

At the end , China will face ultimate decision. that's develop technology only based on the equipment it can produced.

China currently only has 90nm lithography equipment, then it should only develop tech based on 90 nm for now until better equipment comes along. Is abit backward, but self sufficiency Trump's everything else!

Developing more advanced technology than its own current equipment is living on borrowed time.

Huawei 5G tech is built upon shakey ground. If US find way to deny Huawei 7nm tech , Huawei 5G tech would quickly unravel.

So in order to survive Huawei must get into equipment industry and involved in process development with others such as SMIC to quickly ramp up 7nm tech

If Huawei continue to focus only on consumer product one day it will crash and burn.

Take a page out of Samsung. Before Samsung has little foundry competence but it ventured out and got mong song liang from TSMC and helped it to achieve 14nm and subsequently self developed 7nm process.

Samsung's can do attitude in all area is what needed in Huawei.

Besides it's core memory business, Samsung has reached into printer business, washing machine, refrigerator, foundry, and now 5g.

It's very recommendable.

Huawei needs to get into chip manufacturing and Semiconductor equipment business especially lithograph.

It reached over $100 billion revenue,so it has the resources to venture into other areas.

It had to venture into other areas in order to survive.

Some people are salivating and starting to jerk off because Huawei fast becoming number 1 in phone sale but this is based on quicksand, foundation is very shaky.

if tsmc (which is already in chinese hands) drops a client like huawey it will close a bit later. The same argument that makes trump incapable to isolate china in a trade war without collapsing american economy

styx said:

if tsmc (which is already in chinese hands) drops a client like huawey it will close a bit later. The same argument that makes trump incapable to isolate china in a trade war without collapsing american economy

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It will for sure hurt TSMC but it still survive with big US clients like Nvidia, Qualcomm, Xilinx,etc

Again, it's not TSMC's call but Taiwan government' s call to comply with US government. Taiwan government can cut off power to TSMC if it doesn't obey.

styx said:

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Read my other thread why TSMC fab at Nanjing is no good for China because TSMC only use Taiwanese engineers for key positions at the fab and it doesn't teach Chinese anything. They only use Chinese for dummy manual operation at the fab. It's a giant parasite inside China.

wishful thinking, come back to this topic when it actually happens please.

tidalwave said:

Read my other thread why TSMC fab at Nanjing is no good for China because TSMC only use Taiwanese engineers for key positions at the fab and it doesn't teach Chinese anything. They only use Chinese for dummy manual operation at the fab. It's a giant parasite inside China.

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i agree with what you said. The recent challenges faced by ZTE should be a wake up call. However, China can block lots of US companies too if that happens i.e, TSMC vs Hwawei. Intel, Nvidia, Boeing, GM, Tesla, Caterpillar etc will lose 35 to 65% of their revenue. Entire Taiwanese economy will collapse( yes, COLLAPSE). Not even Japan or SK dares to directly challenge China. It is their biggest market/ source of revenue ( or the second biggest ,depending on the specific industries). The US cannot sustain the growth of capitalistic economies of these nations ( that depends on showing higher growth rate and profit every year). So, Huawei & China Inc has got some time.
What I propose is for China to wait a decade and be on the lookout for new technologies on the horizon. This is because the much infamous Moore's law in semiconductor industry has lost its prominence. The industry itself is in a state of weariness about the future. As the processes jump from 28 nm to 14nm to 10,7 and 3nm ,they are realizing that they have reached their limits and pushing any more for smaller etching process would be detrimental due to quantum tunneling and electric leakage ( I'm not so informed regarding these and only have vague ideas) . The lithography itself would need to change as nanolithography, EUV lithography etc are now being ordered or researched into. The biggest provider of EUV lithography machine is the netherland based ASML. They are the ones providing tools for the further push into <14 nm lithography.
China must research on how to reimagine computer processing as a whole or how to manufacture processors in a new efficient, cost competitive way. One reason China may not be THAT interested in investing in these fabrication labs is because they are capital intensive ( 10 to 20 billion dollars minimum) and they can only be used for a limited period ( 5 years ? ) The industry might have shifted to a new process by then. This is the reason why TSMC, Intel and Samsung are the only major players. China needs to also ensure the demand (less of a concern with 800 million consumer base). China must therefore bide the time and spend the money on research into the next big thing in processing. It can be a revolutionary new processor chip or a manufacturing process,but it must ultimately be one that can be improved upon for atleast 2 decades ,providing customers with improved processing capability every year or two.