At a recent media briefing, Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, shared the latest on terminal business and the HarmonyOS ecosystem. Yu said Huawei once followed a global path, cooperating with US, European, Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese firms, but since 2019, to keep the business alive, Huawei joined domestic supply chains to clear multiple barriers and rebuilt advanced chip manufacturing using local technology.
“Relying on self developed chips and HarmonyOS, with domestic supply chains, materials and process, we have largely shed dependence on US technology,” Yu said. HarmonyOS launched in 2019; devices on HarmonyOS 6 and 7 now exceed 90 million, and are expected to pass 100 million by year end. The platform hosts over 450,000 apps and services, 11 million global registered developers, and more than 23,000 app innovation partners. HarmonyOS will enter overseas markets steadily.
Yu said extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is the core tool for top tier advanced chips, a consensus across the global semiconductor industry, and that Chinese research teams and industry partners are fighting to develop such equipment. For now, mainstream volume production still relies on domestic deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography that has been localised.
Yu noted Huawei’s logic folding technique, a path explored under external limits, lifts chip compute without chasing process nodes. He argued the main processor needs advanced process, but many in phone functions do not, so Huawei shifted from chasing a single chip’s node to system engineering, optimising the whole chain through architecture and software hardware co tuning.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Sohu report. The full source is at https://www.sohu.com/a/1085098861_223764 (Sohu). It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.