Honor, Huawei’s brand targeting young consumers, has released new 5G smartphone models and a 5G ecosystem that is expected to be valued at CNY100 trillion in future, said Zhao Ming, Honor’s President. In 2020, at least 100 million 5G smartphones are expected to be sold, accounting for a third of the smartphone market. Meanwhile, 5G and new-technology smartphones will become a catalyst to build a new ecosystem covering games, transport, social, maps, broadcasting and augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR). “It’s key to attract the first batch of 5G users. They are high-end and young consumers, willing to test new things,” said Zhao. Honor released new V30 5G models, which feature the Kirin 990 processors, support the latest 5G standard, and have an improved Matrix Camera system. The prices of the new models start from CNY3,299, which are relatively more affordable compared with existing 5G models from Huawei, Samsung and Vivo.

Japan is likely to surpass the United States as the largest supplier for Huawei, as the company scrambles to deepen partnership with other global suppliers amid U.S. government restrictions. Huawei is also ratcheting up efforts to buy more components and technologies from European suppliers, so as to reduce reliance on U.S. technologies. Huawei has about 3,500 suppliers in Europe, and over the next five years, it plans to procure products worth more than USD40 billion from European companies. Liang Hua, Chairman of Huawei, said that parts procured from Japanese companies are set to total USD10 billion in 2019, a 50% jump from the previous year. In comparison, Huawei procured about USD11 billion products from U.S. suppliers last year and the number is expected to drop significantly in 2019.

5G technologies use a higher frequency than 4G, and each 5G base station covers a smaller area than its 4G counterpart. 5G will also see wider industrial use, further increasing the demand for network coverage. As a result, far more base stations – with some estimating as much as three times more – are needed in the 5G era than in the 4G era. To overcome the difficulty, Huawei is working with telecom carriers and tower operators on innovative technological and industrial solutions.The major part of operators’ investment does not go to equipment. Out of every USD100 that telecom operators invest in base station construction, USD60 is spent on site acquisition, civil work, power supply, and other auxiliaries, according to Huawei. The company has launched the Open Site initiative to convert utility poles into telecom poles, helping operators with massive 5G site acquisitions and optimized site costs.

Meanwhile, Taiwan-based chip designer MediaTek released its new 5G processor Dimensity 1000, offering strong performance in energy consumption and 5G signals. MediaTek’s chipset will be used in new 5G smartphones in the fourth quarter and the beginning of 2020. Oppo and Vivo, China’s top 2 and 3 smartphone vendors behind Huawei, have also announced 5G smartphone release plans in December. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued a plan to promote 5G plus industrial internet, pledging to make key 5G breakthroughs to meet specific requirements of the industrial internet by 2022.

China’s largest hard coal producer Yangquan Coal Industry Group in Shanxi province has deployed an underground 5G base station in one of its coal mines as part of the move to promote 5G-based intelligent mining. The 5G base station can transmit real-time high-definition videos. Lu Le from China Mobile’s Shanxi branch said that the thick dust underground interferes with the signal of traditional video and infrared cameras, but has little effect on 5G-based equipment. He said that “in the past there was only one monitoring point for 100 devices. Now, with the help of 5G, we can set up 100 monitoring points for a single device, which can greatly improve underground safety and real-time monitoring.” Shanxi has more than 900 coal mines with an annual output of 900 million tons.