Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has once again shared his analysis of Huawei’s own Kirin processor today, suggesting that Qualcomm will be hit the hardest.
Mr. Ming-Chi Kuo’s article is titled “Huawei Adopts Kirin 9000s and Subsequent Chips, Qualcomm Becomes the main loser, its views as follows:
- Huawei purchased 23-25 million and 40-42 million cellular SoCs from Qualcomm in 2022 and 2023, respectively.
- However, Huawei expects to adopt its new Kirin processor in all new models starting in 2024, so Qualcomm will not only lose Huawei’s orders altogether starting in 2024, but also risk losing non-Huawei Chinese-branded customers due to Huawei’s increasing cell phone market share.
- Qualcomm’s SoC shipments to Chinese handset brands are expected to decline by at least 50-60 million units in 2024 compared to 2023 as a result of Huawei’s adoption of the new Kirin processor, and are expected to decline each year.
- My latest research suggests that Qualcomm could start a price war as soon as 4Q23 in order to maintain market share in China, which would be detrimental to profits.
- Two other potential risks for Qualcomm are the expected weighting of the Exynos 2400 in Samsung phones and Apple’s expected adoption of its own datacom chips starting in 2025. I’ll discuss more details in the future.
A key point revealed in the article is that Apple will launch an iPhone with a self-developed 5G baseband in 2025, which is expected to be the first to be equipped on the iPhone SE model. Ming-Chi Kuo has previously said that the fourth-generation iPhone SE will be Apple’s first device to feature a custom-designed 5G modem, though Apple’s release plans are unclear.
