According to news reports and press and social media announcements by high-ranking members of US government, the US government has put Huawei on its so-called “Entity List” of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). Our read on this is it similar to what happened with ZTE during C2Q18 last year, a move that severely curtailed ZTE’s shipments and revenue until ZTE made concessions and was removed from the list. Many, but not all, Huawei products use technology only available from US suppliers. US-made semiconductors are the most significant Entity List target that Huawei needs to ship its products. Significant US semiconductor suppliers to Huawei include Intel, Xilinx, and Broadcom.
Huawei is such a significant vendor in many of our coverage areas, including Mobile Radio Access Networks (RAN), Ethernet Switching, and Servers, for instance, that we feel it is a good time to point out that 2019 market-level estimates may be at risk. Additionally, since Chinese cloud services players, like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent cannot delay their capital infrastructure build-outs, alternate suppliers may benefit.
We think it comes as no surprise to Huawei that the US is putting it under pressure. Just over a year ago, we attended the Huawei analyst summit (April 16, 2018) and its then-chairman said in response to the question “Will Huawei find alternate suppliers for data center products, “Today, Intel is the dominant player. Our point of view, we look forward to a more diversified landscape; but we work with Intel mainly now.” Additionally, at Huawei’s most recent analyst summit (mid-April 2019), the three main keynote speakers, all high-ranking executives of the company spoke about how much progress Huawei has made in developing in-house semiconductors and what its plans are to continue developing more. We do, however, think that despite Huawei’s diversification efforts that it still has significant reliance upon key US chip companies.