Huawei is one of the very few manufacturers who develop and use their own processors for smartphones. Samsung is one of them. The company not only uses its Exynos chips for its smartphones but also supplies them to customers. Huawei smartphones come with the company’s own Kirin processors and the Chinese giant has reiterated that it has no intention of supplying Kirin chips to other manufacturers.
Brody Ji, Huawei Consumer Business Group’s senior product director, told journalists recently that the company has no plans to sell its Kirin chips to other manufacturers.
He explained that Kirin is treated as intellectual property by Huawei which enables it to better compete with its rivals. “For Huawei, Kirin is not a business but a product or technology that acts as our competitive edge against rival smartphone brands,” he explained.
Huawei’s HiSilicon division deals with the manufacturing of its Kirin chips. Most of Huawei and its sub-brand Honor’s smartphones use these chips. Huawei does source chips from Qualcomm for some of its devices but users its Kirin chips for the majority of its handsets. The company’s high-end and mid-range devices will continue to ship with its Kirin processors while the entry-level devices will be powered by Qualcomm’s processors.