The booth of Huawei at the 2019 Global Mobile Broadband Forum Photo: Chen Qingqing/GT

HiSilicon, Huawei's chipset affiliate, has been on a surge this year, as about 70 percent of its smartphones are now equipped with its proprietary chipsets, showing that the Chinese technology company has largely reduced its dependence on US components, according to media reports.

Total shipments of Huawei smartphone are expected to reach 260 million units this year, about 100 million of which will be powered by the Kirin CPU, Huang Haifeng, a veteran observer at telecoms industry website cww.net.cn, told the Global Times on Tuesday. 

"As Huawei sees faster growth in its smartphone shipments, its consumer business is also boosting its proprietary chipsets," the analyst said. 

Huawei, which is now the second-largest smartphone vendor worldwide, announced on Wednesday sales hitting 200 million units in smartphone shipments in 2019, overtaking the record it set in 2018. The US has put Huawei on its Entity List in May and later granted a temporary reprieve in August, allowing US companies to work with it. The reprieve was extended to November. 

With regard to semiconductor growth, HiSilicon has already surpassed semiconductor maker MediaTek and become the largest chipset designer in Asia.

HiSilicon has come up with various chipset products and solutions including Kunpeng, Ascend, Kirin and Balong, covering smartphone processors, artificial intelligence-powered technologies, servers and others.

Faced with a complicated external environment, Huawei can only reduce the risk of core chip supply disruptions through more independent chip design and production, and gain more space for further growth, analysts said. 

In addition, Huawei has achieved major breakthroughs in power amplifiers - critical components for 5G products. PA chipset technologies are mainly owned by American companies. 

"This also showed it has increasingly reduced dependence on American components," Fang Jing, an industry analyst at China Merchants Securities, told the Global Times.