Huawei Beats U.S. Sanctions With Its Own Ecosystem and Mate 60 Pro

Huawei has spent more than a decade under the shadow of U.S. sanctions, but instead of collapsing, the Chinese tech giant has turned those restrictions into a catalyst for reinvention.

Back in 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee branded Huawei and ZTE as national security threats, fueling rumors of espionage through telecom hardware. Huawei consistently denied those claims, but in 2019 the company was placed on the U.S. Entity List, cutting it off from crucial U.S. technology and suppliers, including Google.

The impact was immediate: Huawei lost access to Google’s proprietary Android services, the Play Store, and other essential apps. A year later, Washington tightened the screws further by blocking Huawei from sourcing advanced chips produced with U.S. equipment. Analysts at the time predicted that the company’s global smartphone dominance – peaking in Q2 2020 when it briefly surpassed Apple and Samsung – was finished.

But Huawei’s response was radical. The company doubled down on independence, launching its own HarmonyOS operating system and AppGallery marketplace. By 2021, it had built Huawei Mobile Services, an ecosystem designed to rival Google’s. In China, the absence of Google services mattered little, but in Europe and other regions, Huawei felt the sting of losing the familiar Android suite. On the hardware side, Huawei initially relied on Qualcomm chips restricted to 4G, after exhausting its own stock of 5G-capable Kirin processors.

Then, in August 2023, Huawei shocked the industry with the launch of the Mate 60 Pro. Powered by the in-house Kirin 9000S built on SMIC’s 7nm process, the phone restored 5G capability to Huawei’s flagship lineup for the first time since the Mate 40 series. This achievement, under the constraints of U.S. sanctions, was seen as a technological triumph.

At a recent event in Guiyang, Tao Jingwen, Huawei’s president of quality, business process, and IT, declared that the company had “built an ecosystem entirely independent of the United States.” He framed Huawei’s survival as a symbol of the broader Chinese tech sector’s push toward self-reliance. Tao added that the resilience and scale of China’s market would allow the country to surpass the U.S. in artificial intelligence applications.

Huawei’s story illustrates both the fragility and adaptability of global supply chains. While the U.S. sought to stifle the company’s growth, Huawei reinvented itself – cutting dependence on Western technology, advancing domestic semiconductor production, and reshaping its ecosystem. Whether it can reclaim its crown as the world’s top smartphone vendor remains to be seen, but its comeback, capped by the Mate 60 Pro’s debut, has already rewritten the narrative of survival under sanctions.