Here’s why building a smartphone without US tech is impossible

Huawei is caught in the crossfire of the US-China trade war. With the US firms barred from trading with Huawei, the Chinese conglomerate faces an existential crisis: building a handset from scratch.

Huawei is the second biggest smartphone brand in the world that shipped more than 200 million handsets last year; but even for a company with such stature, making a phone from the ground up — especially without sourcing components from the US — is increasingly proving to be a herculean task.