News Analysis Huawei, after being plagued by U.S. sanctions for two and a half years, has seen its chipmaker also in distress—not only has its high-end chip production has been halted, but also shipments of its mobile application processors (AP) have shrunk. Shipments for Huawei chipmaker HiSilicon’s smartphone APs declined 96 percent in the third quarter of 2021 after the company was unable to produce high-end chips following consecutive U.S. sanctions from 2019 to 2020, according to a report by Strategy Analytics, a market research institution, on Dec. 23, 2021. The report said that the global smartphone AP market grew 17 percent to $8.3 billion in the third quarter of 2021, with Qualcomm, Apple, MediaTek, Samsung LSI, and Unisoc taking the top five portions. HiSilicon in 2020 was the second-largest customer of TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company)—the world’s largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry—but was delisted from TSMC’s top 10 customers …