A teardown reveals that Huawei's P40 phone contains several critical US parts, primarily RF chips; the US parts were made by Qualcomm, Skyworks and Qorvo
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after Huawei declared its Mate 30 handsets and 5G networking gear "America-free", the Financial Times teardown of the P40 shows the claim didn't extend to phones: critical radio-frequency chips from Qualcomm, Skyworks and Qorvo are still inside. RF front-end content is precisely where Huawei's US ban bites hardest, because those parts were the hardest to replace with domestic alternatives.
That gap is what the subsequent teardown record tracks closing: TechInsights later credited the Mate 60 Pro's China-fabricated Kirin 9000s and its domestic radio-frequency design progress with displacing US 5G suppliers, and by late 2025 Nikkei found [[a:894094|57% Chinese components in the Mate 70 Pro and Pura 80 Pro versus 32% in similarly priced 2023 models]]. The P40 sits at the start of that substitution curve.
First-order effects
- Qualcomm, Skyworks and Qorvo face direct revenue exposure: their RF chips ship in a flagship Huawei phone at the same moment US export controls put future sales to Huawei in doubt, leaving license decisions as the swing factor for that volume.
- Huawei launches the P40 dependent on three US suppliers for parts it cannot yet source domestically, making each shipment contingent on political rather than commercial terms.
Second-order effects
- The dependency gives Huawei's procurement machine a precise target list — the teardown effectively hands Chinese RF designers a bill of materials to replicate, which is exactly the displacement TechInsights later documented in the Mate 60 Pro.
- US RF vendors' Huawei share converts into a one-time winddown rather than recurring revenue, pushing them toward other handset customers while Chinese rivals inherit the displaced demand inside Huawei's supply chain.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, teardowns become the scoreboard for tech decoupling: each generation shows US content falling as domestic substitutes mature, structurally shrinking the addressable China market for Qualcomm, Skyworks and Qorvo regardless of future licensing.
- The RF case generalizes across the BOM — the same substitution logic the P40 exposed for radio chips reappears in Huawei's laptops and application processors, pointing toward parallel, partially disconnected US and Chinese component ecosystems.
The trend: US export controls turned Huawei's supply chain into a staged substitution program, with American RF and processor content steadily replaced by domestic parts across successive flagship generations.