Huawei, Mate 40 Smartphone, and Digital Yuan

Huawei is one of the most famous smartphone makers in the world. The famous company made an important announcement on the Chinese microblogging website Weibo on October 30. According to this announcement, the Mate 40 smartphone will include an integrated hardware wallet for China’s digital currency, the digital yuan.

Based on the information provided by the company, this will be the first smartphone to feature such a wallet. According to the information from the post, users will be able to control as well as protect their anonymity. Moreover, customers will be able to perform dual offline transactions. These enable mobile phone users to transfer funds simply by touching their devices together. This will work even if both of them are offline.

Huawei is also offering a free Mate 40 to the Weibo user who forwards the post to most people.

Huawei and U.S. sanctions

Interestingly, Mate 40 is the first Huawei smartphone that is using 5nm chip technology. As a reminder, Apple’s iPhone 12 also comes with 5nm chip technology. People should keep in mind that technology allows billions of more transistors to be packed onto a single chip. As a result, it is possible to make smartphones more powerful.

However, everything is not simple as it might appear at the first glance. Due to the ongoing trade war between the largest economies in the world, the U.S. and China, the tech giant will be unable to acquire or make more of its Kirin 9000 processors. It means when the company will use all of its Kirin 9000 processors, it would be hard or even impossible to receive its Kirin 9000 processors.

Importantly, due to the ongoing trade restrictions imposed by the U.S. administration, it’s not currently possible for TSMC to supply any more semiconductors to Huawei built using U.S. technology.  Moreover, these phones are not compatible with a number of popular apps. As a result, it won’t be easy for the company to sell this smartphone outside of the country in vast quantities.

It is worth noting that, Mate 40 comes without Goole apps, including the Google Play Store. As a result, customers have to use Huawei AppGallery as its main app store.

To sum up, due to all the factors mentioned above, it will be quite difficult to convince potential customers in Europe and elsewhere to buy Mate 40. Nevertheless, this phone comes with interesting features, such as an integrated hardware wallet for China’s digital currency, the digital yuan.