On November 19th, according to the news of Qichacha, Huawei is transferring a number of trademarks, and the transferee is Honor Terminal Co., Ltd., and the number of trademark transfers has exceeded 700.
Specifically, the trademarks include Honor’s own choice, Honor, Honor House, etc. The international classification of trademarks involves scientific instruments, furniture, clothing, shoes and hats, etc., which may declare that Honor will be completely separated from Huawei.
It is reported that Huawei sold its own Honor mobile phone business as early as November 2020, and the related business assets of the Honor Honor brand were fully acquired by Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co., Ltd. Exit the ranks of glorious investors.
The “bond” between Huawei and Honor
Before being sanctioned by the United States, Honor had always been widely known as a Huawei brand.
At the end of 2013, Huawei e-commerce held a new product launch conference in Beijing with the theme of “Who and Glory”. At the launch, the “Honor” brand was officially announced to the public as an independent image. At the press conference, Huawei Honor officially launched two mobile phones of the Honor 3 series, the Honor 3C and the Honor 3X; the release of these two phones officially announced the establishment of the Huawei Honor brand.
The birth of Huawei Honor is to fight against Internet brands such as Xiaomi and Meizu.
At that time, most of the domestic low-end smartphone industry was divided by Xiaomi and Meizu, and other mobile phone manufacturers could not get involved. However, Huawei just relied on the Honor series to successfully occupy the middle and low-end smartphones in the hands of Xiaomi and Meizu. market place.
Why Huawei Glory can be in full swing in the domestic low-end smartphone market? The answer is Huawei’s self-developed Kirin chip. As we all know, the ultimate combat power of a mobile phone depends on its processor performance.
At that time, most domestic manufacturers chose to import mobile phone chips from Qualcomm or MediaTek. Only Huawei always adhered to its original intention, sharpened its sword for ten years, and never stopped the pace of self-developed chips, and successfully developed a chip that can be used in smartphones. The Kirin series chips are used, and Huawei has thus become the first domestic company with self-developed chips.
In 2009, K3V1, Huawei’s first-generation mobile phone AP (application processor), was the beginning and starting point of Huawei’s smartphone chips, and accumulated valuable experience for subsequent mobile phone chip research and development.
In 2012, K30V2, a high-performance and small-sized 4-core AP, was also the first self-developed chip on Huawei mobile phones.
In 2013, Kirin 910, Huawei’s first 4-core LTE SoC. As a result, Kirin officially debuted.
In 2014, Kirin 920, the industry’s first commercial LTE Cat. 6 SoC, that is, this chip, has successfully allowed Huawei Honor mobile phone to successfully open up the domestic low-end smartphone market, and has made great contributions to the layout of Huawei Honor mobile phone in the low-end smartphone market in the future.
Huawei’s Honor 6 was officially released in 2014. The Honor 6 was first equipped with Kirin 920 SoC, which was the world’s first 8-core 4G Cat 6 chip. This chip broke the monopoly of Qualcomm and MediaTek in the domestic mobile phone chip field at that time, and brought Huawei to the market. With huge operating income, it became a strong competitor of Xiaomi, a giant in the domestic low-end smartphone field at that time.
Since then, Huawei has worked hard and devoted itself to the research and development of Kirin chips. In 2015, Kirin 950, the industry’s first 16nm FinFET+ flagship SoC, officially entered the world’s first camp of mobile phone chips. In 2017, Kirin 970, Huawei’s first artificial intelligence mobile phone chip, pioneered the end-to-end AI industry. In 2018, Kirin 980, the world’s first commercial 7nm SoC, ranked first in the Android camp in terms of performance. In 2019, Kirin 990 5G, the industry’s first 7nm + EUV flagship 5G SoC.
Since then, Huawei has embarked on an unrivaled path in the domestic chip field. Just when the whole world thought that Huawei’s high-tech will lead us to catch up with the international pace, the bad news came suddenly!
Huawei’s development path is frustrated
All of this starts with the 5G technology developed by Huawei.
On November 17, 2016, Huawei’s polar code solution was adopted at the meeting as the final solution for 5G, the 5G era kicked off, and Huawei became one of the leaders of the 5G standard. The current era is the era of computing power and information. Any country that dominates 5G technology will have economic, intelligence and military advantages in the 5G era.
As a result, the United States believes that Huawei’s technology poses a threat to it, and decides to start ordering restrictions on Huawei’s development.
On May 15, 2019, the U.S. government officially announced that it would include Huawei and its subsidiaries on the “entity list” for export control. Not only that, but in order to further prevent Huawei’s development, the United States has repeatedly revised its ban on Huawei for technical blockade. ;
On May 15, 2020, the US government began to prohibit Huawei from using the chip design software of American companies, and on August 17, 2020, many companies around the world were prohibited from supplying chips containing American technology to Huawei. Since then, the US chip sanctions against Huawei have officially started. Affected by the restraining order, many well-known chip companies such as TSMC, Qualcomm, Samsung, and SMIC have been forced to stop supplying chips to Huawei.
After that, due to the lack of main radio frequency chips, the Kirin 5G chip independently developed by Huawei was forced to be used as a 4G chip even if it had 5G functions. Huawei’s foreign mobile phone business was also severely affected. Throughout 2019, Huawei Overseas shipments of mobile phones fell by 40 million to 60 million units, a 40% decline, and Huawei’s revenue fell by $30 billion.
Because Huawei invests a lot of money in research and development every year, Huawei’s business situation is seriously unable to make ends meet. Therefore, Huawei was forced to sell its Honor brand.
In November 2020, it was reported that a number of companies issued a joint statement in the “Shenzhen Special Zone News”. Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co., Ltd. has signed an acquisition agreement with Huawei Investment Holdings Co., Ltd. to complete the comprehensive acquisition of the business assets related to the Honor brand. .
Since then, Huawei has officially withdrawn from the ranks of Honor investors.
Previously, Mr. Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, said: Encourage New Honor to embrace globalization and become Huawei’s strongest competitor. After the “divorce” between Honor and Huawei, don’t be disconnected. The new Honor should regard Huawei as an opponent.
Today (November 19), there is news on the Internet that Huawei is in the process of transferring the Honor trademark, which shows that Huawei and Honor will only be competitors in the future.
In 2023, Huawei mobile phone “return of the king”?
It is worth noting that in the face of many difficulties, some media reported that Yu Chengdong said at a recent consumer business internal presentation, “Huawei mobile phones will continue to be made, and the king will return in 2023!”
In this regard, Huawei insiders said that the briefing was an internal recruitment event for the company, which means that the consumer business has stopped shrinking and has turned to expansion. In addition, Huawei will release a new Mate50 series flagship mobile phone early next year. Some of the Mate50 uses the Kirin 990 chip and some use the Qualcomm 898 chip, but only the 4G version.
Huawei has made substantial progress in the chip supply chain, multiple people familiar with the matter said. An industry insider close to a telecom operator said that the current schedule given by Huawei’s sales staff to the operator is, “28nm will be able to mass-produce next year, and 14nm will be mass-produced next year.” Huawei HiSilicon insiders said, “Now is the time to boil over. After two or three years, mass production will be possible.”
Bloomberg previously reported that Huawei is considering licensing its designs to a unit of the state-owned China Post and Telecommunications Equipment Group Co., or PTAC, which would then seek to buy a blacklist in the Trump era, people familiar with the matter said. components, which already sells Huawei-branded Nova phones on its website, and under the partnership, the unit, called Xnova, will offer its own branded phones based on Huawei designs. The report pointed out that the move may be Huawei’s best chance to save its smartphone business.
Epilogue
On November 17th (Wednesday), Huawei released the Mate X2 Collector’s Edition and the plain leather folding screen mobile phone at Huawei’s full-scenario smart life new product launch conference, which increased the memory from 8G to 12G and added 512GB of storage. Specifications, the equipped Kirin 9000 chip is upgraded to support 5G, the price is 18,999 yuan, and it is sold out in seconds. It is reported that this may be Huawei’s last batch of 5G mobile phones.
According to the global smartphone share in the third quarter of this year announced by IDC not long ago, Huawei, which has lost its glory, has also fallen into the ranks of Others, and the list of Others has dropped by 18.7% year-on-year, which shows that the market share of Huawei’s mobile phones has declined. already extremely limited. You must know that in the third quarter of last year, Huawei shipped 51.9 million units, accounting for 14.7% of the global market share, ranking second in the world.
Although today’s Huawei has been hit hard, it has not given up on the road to high-tech. On the one hand, it began to purchase Qualcomm chips to tide over the difficulties and maintain the mobile phone business; on the other hand, Huawei’s investment in supporting independent research and development has never been reduced, and even on November 9, the Euler system was still in China. Donate to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation to accelerate the development of the domestic operating system industry. In addition, Huawei is also actively developing Hongmeng OS to build an ecosystem where everything is connected. If this plan is successful, then mobile phones are only a small part of the ecosystem. It is impossible for such a Huawei to fall due to the temporary targeting of the United States. After experiencing this ordeal, Huawei will definitely break down and stand up again, and embark on its own path again.
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