Huawei Technologies’ latest high-end smartphone features more Chinese suppliers, including a new flash memory chip and an improved processor, a teardown analysis showed, pointing to the progress China is making towards tech self-sufficiency.

Online tech repair company iFixit and consultancy TechSearch International examined the inside of Huawei’s Pura 70 Pro for Reuters, finding a NAND memory chip they said was likely packaged by the Chinese telecommunication equipment maker’s in-house semiconductor design unit HiSilicon and several other components made by Chinese suppliers.

Huawei’s resurgence in the high-end smartphone market after four years of US sanctions is being widely watched by both rivals and US politicians, as it has become a symbol of growing US-China trade frictions and the mainland’s bid for technology self-sufficiency.

The teardown by iFixit and TechSearch also found that the Pura 70 smartphones run on an advanced chipset made by Huawei called the Kirin 9010, which is likely only a slightly improved version of the Chinese-made advanced chip used on the 5G Mate 60 series.

US to bar China’s Huawei lab from certifying wireless equipment

“While we cannot provide an exact percentage, we’d say the domestic component usage is high, and definitely higher than in the Mate 60,” said Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown technician.

“This is about self-sufficiency, all of this, everything you see when you open up a smartphone and see whatever are made by Chinese manufacturers, this is all about self-sufficiency,” Mokhtari said.

Huawei declined to comment.

Huawei launched the Pura 70’s four smartphone models in late April and the series quickly sold out. Analysts say it will likely take more market share from Apple’s iPhone on the mainland, while policymakers in Washington are questioning the efficacy of US curbs on the telecoms equipment giant.

Earlier analysis by teardown firms such as TechInsights of the Mate 60, launched in August last year, found the 5G smartphone to be using DRAM and NAND memory chips made by South Korea’s SK Hynix. SK Hynix said at the time it no longer did business with Huawei, while analysts said the chips likely came from stockpiles.

The Pura 70 still contains a DRAM chip made by SK Hynix, according to iFixit and TechSearch, but the NAND flash memory chip was likely packaged by Huawei’s HiSilicon unit this time around and was made up of NAND dies each with a capacity of 1 terabyte. This is comparable to products made by major flash memory producers such as SK Hynix, Kioxia and Micron Technology.

However, the teardown firms were unable to definitively identify the manufacturer of the wafer, as the markings on the NAND die were unfamiliar, they added. But iFixit said they believed that HiSilicon may have produced the memory controller as well.

“In our teardown our chip ID expert has identified it as a particular HiSilicon chip,” iFixit’s Mokhtari said.

SK Hynix reiterated that it was “strictly complying with the relevant policies since the restrictions against Huawei were announced and has also suspended any transactions with the company since then”.

Huawei’s new Pura 70 smartphones receive green light to be sold in Malaysia

The iFixit and TechSearch’s analysis of the processor used in the Pura 70 Pro also suggests Huawei may have only made incremental improvements in its ability to produce an advanced chip with Chinese partners in the months since it launched the Mate 60 series.

The processor is similar to the one employed in the Mate 60 series that was produced for Huawei by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) using the Chinese chip foundry’s 7-nanometre N+2 manufacturing process, they said.

“This is significant because news of the 9000S on a 7-nm node caused a bit of a panic last year when US lawmakers were confronted with the possibility that the sanctions imposed on Chinese chip makers might not slow their technological progress after all,” iFixit said.

“The fact that the 9010 is still a 7-nm process chip, and that it’s so close to the 9000S, might seem to suggest that Chinese chip manufacturing has indeed been slowed.”

Still, he cautioned against underestimating Huawei, saying that SMIC was still expected to make a leap to a 5nm manufacturing node before the end of the year.

SMIC did not respond to a request for comment.