Huawei reportedly halts smartphone production lines after US ban

According to a report from the South China Morning Post, Huawei has reduced orders for new phones amid an ongoing US export ban on the Chinese tech giant.

Huawei originally set out a target to surpass Samsung as the world’s largest smartphone maker by 2020. However, the tussle between the US and Chinese phone maker has crushed Huawei’s dreams to become the number one smartphone maker by next year.

As the new situation has emerged, it is too early to say whether we are able to achieve the goal,” Zhao Ming, the president of Honor said, responding to questions about Huawei’s plans to overtake Samsung as the world’s largest smartphone vendor by 2020. In Q1 2019, Huawei shipped an estimated 59.1 million smartphones worldwide, according to research firm IDC. The company is the second largest smartphone maker behind Samsung and ahead of Apple.

The news of Foxconn halting production lines for several lines for Huawei phones is an early indication of how the US ban could damage the company’s smartphone business.

Last month, the Trump administration had put Huawei on a trade backlist that barred the company from doing any business with the North American firms without approval.

Huawei says it has been developing its own mobile operating system, according to the company’s mobile business chief Richard Yu. The operating system, likely to be called Ark OS, will run on a number of devices including smartphones, laptops, tablets, wearables, and TVs. The Huawei OS will reportedly hit the market as soon as this year.

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