According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, a teardown of the Huawei Mate 30 shows that the device contains no hardware that originated in the United States.
The Huawei ban explicitly states that Huawei can no longer conduct business with any US-based firms. This teardown suggests that Huawei is fully capable of developing smartphones without buying any US hardware.
However, the hardware isn’t everything. The Huawei Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro don’t have access to Google apps which is likely the biggest reason why the device still doesn’t have a full global release. Additionally, even though the smartphone’s hardware didn’t originate from the United States, many of the technologies included in the phone necessitate licenses with US-based companies in order to be sold. Huawei still doesn’t have a way around these issues.
Still, the fact that the company can produce a phone of the highest caliber without any US hardware is certainly notable.
Related: Huawei thinks it can still be number one without Google’s services
Interestingly, we have a separate report from Reuters that suggests the US government is mulling over increasing the scope of the Huawei ban. According to two anonymous sources, the Trump administration could expand the reach of the Entity List to prohibit Huawei from buying products even from foreign companies that are allied with the United States.
If true, this would put Huawei in an even trickier situation than it’s in right now. However, this news is very peculiar as it appeared the US government was pulling back the ban, not increasing its powers. For example, the US granted Microsoft a license to work with Huawei again, suggesting other companies — perhaps even Google — could be next. This news appears to dash those hopes.
As of today, there are only a handful of countries where you can legitimately purchase a Huawei Mate 30 or Mate 30 Pro, and none of them allow Google apps to come pre-installed.
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