Huawei recently revealed that it is running out of processor chips because of U.S. sanctions against the company. The CEO of Huawei's consumer business unit, Richard Yu, said in a conference that the company will not be producing its own Kirin chipsets as of next month, because of the constant economic pressure from the U.S. He explained that in the second round of U.S. sanctions, Huawei's chip producers only accepted orders till 15 May and production will close on 15 September. Yu added that this year may be the last generation of Kirin high-end chip and the Huawei Mate 40 phone may be the last phone with that chip.
The smartphone vendor was accused by the U.S. of building backdoors into network infrastructure to aid Chinese government's spying attempts. Huawei denied the accusations, but the U.S. government placed the company and its 114 affiliates on the Entity List in May 2019, hence restricting Huawei from buying technology from U.S. firms without explicit approval from the U.S. government. As a result, the tech giant Google could not continue its business with Huawei, hence disabling the company to obtain an Android license, and keeping Google apps off Huawei devices. The ban was justified with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The order was even extended by the Trump Administration to May 2021, followed by an amended export rule issued by the U.S. Commerce Department, to block shipments of semiconductors, that are the direct product of certain American software and technology, to Huawei. As a result, foreign manufacturers of semiconductors that use American software and technology could not ship their products to Huawei without obtaining a license from the U.S. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer.
Despite Huawei's operations being banned in the U.S., the company managed to beat Samsung to become the best smartphone seller and shipped more smartphones than any other company from April to June.
