Trade War with China

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Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
I was thinking about that, the best US option forward is to sign big, long-term contracts at discounted prices to supply Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo, etc... with premium parts hoping they can compete with Huawei in China's market to deprive Huawei of some of the revenue it needs to sustain its R&D. If that happens, then these Chinese companies would become vessels for selling US parts to the Chinese market in competition with China's indigenization efforts.

These companies need to resist that temptation and start moving in the direction of self-sufficiency, and hopefully, they can team up with Huawei to support the build-up of Chinese components because if they don't, they will essentially become foreign agents. If that happens, China's government needs to instruct them on the correct path or find a way to shut them down if they do not follow it.

Its kind of a problem since Oppo and Vivo has some kind of lawsuit with Qualcomm, but the lawsuit doesn't produce emnity enough to stop Qualcomm from supplying Oppo and Vivo with their chips (although one can say business is still business.) But Oppo and Vivo do tend to push their Mediatek devices first and foremost, and Xiaomi also has Mediatek devices. The low and midrange is the biggest volume for these brands and that is where these Mediatek devices reside. These companies do have low end to mid end Qualcomm devices though.

Team up with Huawei? Didn't Huawei refuse to sell HiSilicon SOCs to them? Huawei is not completely a saint here nor a patriot, although one can argue that they made Kirin exclusively for their own phones. You want to make the Chinese smartphone industry as a whole weened off from foreign parts, you need HiSilicon to be independent so they can serve the other makers without suspicion of bias.
 

gelgoog

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
China can simply ban devices with Qualcomm chips from being sold in China.

I would not be surprised if the Chinese government is trying to time their ban for maximum damage however. If they do the ban close to early fall then it would have maximum impact on smartphone production and would cause companies to miss the entire Xmas shopping period.

It would have minimum effect on companies like Oppo or Xiaomi, since those rely on flash sales.
Companies like Apple or perhaps Lenovo would be way more affected.
 

ZeEa5KPul

Colonel
Registered Member
Going back to OS platforms, sorry, Windows Phone --- and one as backed by as mighty as Microsoft --- could not budge it, chances are a new platform won't make alive outside of China. Samsung also did try on their own platform, called Tizen. Now its reduced to smartwatches and smart TVs only.
I'm unconvinced by your examples, since I have to question Microsoft and Samsung's commitment. Handsets form a large part of Huawei's revenue, and foreign-sold handsets half of that. How willing would Huawei be to give up that revenue? By contrast, search and handsets form an infinitesimal part of Microsoft's revenue - it was never going to do anything more than a halfhearted foray.

Samsung is definitely more dependent on smartphones, but they aren't under sanctions preventing them from working with Google. How might Tizen have turned out if Samsung needed it to survive? It might still have failed, but they definitely would have put up more of a fight.

As for installing Google Play on non Google Play Android devices, check again, that's been done and often using the Amazon Fire Tablets.
If I'm wrong and Google Play can be pre-installed on the new Huawei OS then all this is moot.

China can simply ban devices with Qualcomm chips from being sold in China.
I would not be surprised if the Chinese government is trying to time their ban for maximum damage however. If they do the ban close to early fall then it would have maximum impact on smartphone production and would cause companies to miss the entire Xmas shopping period.
Why ban? Just tariff American semiconductors and use that money to fund research.

You clearly would prefer Huawei to surrender and die instead of fight.
There's no prospect of Huawei dying. Even in the worst case scenario, the China market alone will ensure it remains a colossal company. The Great Firewall has ensured that Google will never have the reach in China it has elsewhere.
 

manqiangrexue

Brigadier
Its kind of a problem since Oppo and Vivo has some kind of lawsuit with Qualcomm, but the lawsuit doesn't produce emnity enough to stop Qualcomm from supplying Oppo and Vivo with their chips (although one can say business is still business.) But Oppo and Vivo do tend to push their Mediatek devices first and foremost, and Xiaomi also has Mediatek devices. The low and midrange is the biggest volume for these brands and that is where these Mediatek devices reside. These companies do have low end to mid end Qualcomm devices though.

Team up with Huawei? Didn't Huawei refuse to sell HiSilicon SOCs to them? Huawei is not completely a saint here nor a patriot, although one can argue that they made Kirin exclusively for their own phones. You want to make the Chinese smartphone industry as a whole weened off from foreign parts, you need HiSilicon to be independent so they can serve the other makers without suspicion of bias.
SMIC has a rather heavy load on its shoulders. Can it replace the low-mid range Mediatek chips as is or in short order? I know it needs some time and should be hauling all sorts of ass to be able to replace TSMC for the top end chips.

I agree Huawei should be less selfish with its Kirins. Cooperation is both ways and the goal should be to replace all Qualcomm chips in China with Kirins within as short a time-span as possible. HiSilicon should be China's Qualcomm.
 

PikeCowboy

Junior Member
Boeing didn't have a monopoly, since it was at some point, competing with McDonnell Douglas....which died. Airbus took the gap left by the maker of the DC-8, 9 and 10 planes. Lockheed (before the Martin) was also in the airline business, and then left out of it. Why both McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed went out? Because both flopped when they threw their eggs into the tri jet design (DC-10 and L1011). The DC-10 had its disasters and the tri-jet proved uneconomical compared to the dual jet engine configuration. When Airbus entered the business, those two other companies were still around.

Airbus wasn't immediately competitive at the outset of the A320. It had to be incubated through subsidies in a protected market while the rest of the world was being dominated by Boeing. You can draw parallels if you want to...
 

manqiangrexue

Brigadier
There's no prospect of Huawei dying. Even in the worse case scenario, the China market alone will ensure it remains a colossal company. The Great Firewall has ensured that Google will never have the reach in China it has elsewhere.
A lot of China's brilliance shines long after the moves are made.

Long ago, it was questionable why China would be so devoted to the rare earth industry when the profit was low, investment high, and damage to the environment great. Now we see.

When China banned Google, it looked like negotiations were just not working out between the PRC and Google and China's scientists would suffer for it. Now, we see that in addition to China's own search engines, we have a Chinese population impervious to a Google ban.

Very impressive long-term strategic planning.
 

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
Airbus wasn't immediately competitive at the outset of the A320. It had to be incubated through subsidies in a protected market while the rest of the world was being dominated by Boeing. You can draw parallels if you want to...

Their first planes was the A300. When the A320 came along, Boeing started to panic because it was every bit better and more advanced than the 737, which up to this day, doesn't do FBW. And of course Airbus was heavily government subsidized. The truth is, the US is more isolated or on its own, while the rest of the world embodies different and higher degrees of state capitalism. China's economic model isn't completely self invented.

An airliner is a completely different entity from a software platform however, which depends on convincing developers to develop on it. You might be able to convince Chinese developers on Hongmeng, but its unlikely American and European developers would. You are going to end up with the Galapagos situation like what happened to the Japanese Keitai industry.
 

manqiangrexue

Brigadier
An airliner is a completely different entity from a software platform however, which depends on convincing developers to develop on it. You might be able to convince Chinese developers on Hongmeng, but its unlikely American and European developers would. You are going to end up with the Galapagos situation like what happened to the Japanese Keitai industry.
Chinese developers represents the largest market in the world now so if these countries want to earn money with their apps, they'd better make a version for the OS of the Chinese market.

But that's my take. According to your take, what is the correct solution for China/Huawei?
 

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
I'm unconvinced by your examples, since I have to question Microsoft and Samsung's commitment. Handsets form a large part of Huawei's revenue, and foreign-sold handsets half of that. How willing would Huawei be to give up that revenue? By contrast, search and handsets form an infinitesimal part of Microsoft's revenue - it was never going to do anything more than a halfhearted foray.

Revenue and profits are two things entirely. You might get revenue from the smartphones but your profits are razor thin. Samsung itself has shown a lack of enthusiasm lately with their smartphones because selling displays and memory chips are proving more profitable.

Samsung is definitely more dependent on smartphones, but they aren't under sanctions preventing them from working with Google. How might Tizen have turned out if Samsung needed it to survive? It might still have failed, but they definitely would have put up more of a fight.

Tizen won't survive either and even Tizen was backed by Intel.

If I'm wrong and Google Play can be pre-installed on the new Huawei OS then all this is moot.

I wont call it a new OS, as the AR in ARK sounds like Android Runtime, which Google refers to as ART. ART replaces the Davik virtual machine used in Android before. This means an OS that can run Android apps. You don't need the Android OS per se to run Android apps, since Android apps always runs in some sort of emulation. You can try Blue Stacks on the PC, which lets your run Google Play and Android games on the PC.

I won't call it pre-installed. The new devices cannot be sold with Google apps. It doesn't mean you can post install these apps into the device like on Amazon Fire Tablets.

With the EU not happy about the Google-Android monopoly, and after having fined Google 5 billion Euros, you might see a potential opportunity in the EU.

Why ban? Just tariff American semiconductors and use that money to fund research.

Throw the baby out with the bathwater strategies don't work. I am pretty sure ARM and Google is pretty unhappy about this, since it cost them plenty of revenue. It is estimated that Huawei phones bring about $400 to $500 million of revenue on the Google Play alone. I myself paid for game microtransactions on my Huawei devices, and Google collects 30% "Google Play tax" from that. For ARM, this might even kill them as Huawei turns out to be their biggest customer using ARM Cortex ---- a market with only two participants, the other being Mediatek.

There's no prospect of Huawei dying. Even in the worst case scenario, the China market alone will ensure it remains a colossal company. The Great Firewall has ensured that Google will never have the reach in China it has elsewhere.

China telecoms should increase the number of Huawei and ZTE networks at the expense of Ericsson and Nokia but still give the two Nordics some business. Not surprisingly Ericsson and Nokia also buidl some of their gear in China. Cisco should be rooted out from the Chinese networks simply as a security risk, but allowed to stay in China to manufacture their routers.

Going to another topic, I believe the "Unreliable" list are going to be filled with US tech companies including Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and so on, companies that collect individual data. This is meant not just as a warning for Chinese inside China but also out of it. But you know, the EU is already heading this path way ahead of China and the EU crusade against US tech companies may do more damage to the US than any Chinese measure.
 
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