Huawei’s HiSilicon, once struggling due to trade restrictions, has made a remarkable comeback in the smartphone chip market. Recent data shows a staggering 605% growth in HiSilicon’s chip shipments during the first half of 2024, marking it as the industry’s biggest surprise.
As widely known, since 2020, Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin mobile chips once became absolutely unavailable. After the Kirin 9000 chip, HiSilicon couldn’t find any manufacturing partners, and even TSMC didn’t dare to produce chips for them.
After that, when Huawei used up its stock of Kirin chips, they had to resort to Qualcomm’s 4G chips. This meant they could only release 4G phones, much to everyone’s disappointment.
However, in the third quarter of 2023, Huawei’s Mate60 made a triumphant return. People discovered that Huawei had new mobile chips, namely the Kirin 9000S. This year’s Pura70 uses the Kirin 9010.
These two chips have since spawned a large family of chips, including the 9000SL, 9000S1, 9000W, 9000WL, 9000WM, and 9010L.
Consequently, Huawei’s phones and tablets began to abandon Qualcomm chips in favor of their own Kirin chips. With the return of Kirin chips and 5G capabilities, Huawei’s phone sales started to surge.
Recently, Huawei’s tri-fold phone, the Mate XT, also uses the Kirin 9010 chip. With Huawei phones widely adopting Kirin chips and Huawei’s phone sales soaring, the natural result is a significant increase in HiSilicon chip shipments.
Sigmaintell recently released global mobile chip shipment data for the first half of 2024. According to their analysis, global smartphone processor chip shipments reached about 570 million units in the first half of 2024, a 9% year-on-year increase.
MediaTek ranks first with shipments of 239 million units, growing by 11% and accounting for 42% of the global share. Qualcomm follows with 137 million units shipped, a 3% decrease, representing 24% of the global share.
Next are Apple, UNISOC, Samsung, and Huawei HiSilicon. These six manufacturers account for 99% of all market share, essentially representing the main players in the global mobile chip market.
Among them, Huawei’s growth is the most striking. In the first half of 2024, HiSilicon chip shipments reached 20 million units, accounting for 4% of the global market. In contrast, in the first half of 2023, HiSilicon chip shipments were only 3 million units, representing just 1% of the market.
This means that HiSilicon chips grew by 605% in the first half of 2024, with market share increasing from 1% to 4%, a 3 percentage point increase.
However, despite the dramatic increase in shipments, HiSilicon still ranks sixth. There’s still a significant gap with Samsung, which has a 6% market share, 1.8 times that of Huawei. UNISOC’s shipments are 44 million, 2.2 times that of HiSilicon.
Therefore, HiSilicon needs to continue its efforts, increasing both chip production capacity and phone shipments. Otherwise, it will remain in sixth place.