Huawei’s new Pura 70 Pro smartphone uses more China-made parts, memory chip
- Huawei’s resurgence in the high-end smartphone market after four years of US sanctions is being widely watched by both rivals and US politicians
- Analysis of the processor used by the Pura 70 Pro suggests that Huawei may have only made incremental improvements in its ability to produce an advanced chip
Huawei Technologies’ latest high-end smartphone features more Chinese suppliers, including a new flash memory chip and an improved processor, a teardown analysis showed, pointing to the progress China is making towards tech self-sufficiency.
Online tech repair company iFixit and consultancy TechSearch International examined the inside of Huawei’s Pura 70 Pro for Reuters, finding a NAND memory chip they said was likely packaged by the Chinese telecommunication equipment maker’s in-house semiconductor design unit HiSilicon and several other components made by Chinese suppliers.
Huawei’s resurgence in the high-end smartphone market after four years of US sanctions is being widely watched by both rivals and US politicians, as it has become a symbol of growing US-China trade frictions and the mainland's bid for technology self-sufficiency.
The teardown by iFixit and TechSearch also found that the Pura 70 smartphones run on an advanced chipset made by Huawei called the Kirin 9010, which is likely only a slightly improved version of the Chinese-made advanced chip used on the 5G Mate 60 series.
“While we cannot provide an exact percentage, we’d say the domestic component usage is high, and definitely higher than in the Mate 60,” said Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown technician.
