Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping said the company has sufficient semiconductor stock for telecom base stations in a press conference at Huawei Connect 2020.
This is the first official confirmation that Huawei has stocked up semiconductors last year in preparation for US sanctions.
US’s sanction on the Chinese tech giant went into effect on September 15.
Guo Ping said the company had used hundreds of millions of semiconductors a year for its smartphone oepration and US sanctions has caused great difficulty. It was looking for ways to overcome the situation, the chairman said.
He also said the company would gladly use Qualcomm chips if US gave the approval. Huawei has been buying chips from the US tech giant for the past ten years.
The chairman also said that historically, in the 1990s, China used mostly foreign-made telecom switches. But due to global embargo from the Tienanmen Square incident, Huawei began producing its own switch equipment.
US Cisco had a 50.9% market share in telecom switches last year, according to Dell’Oro Group. Huawei was second place with a 9.6% share.
