As Huawei continues to struggle in its smartphone business due to the effects of the US trade ban, the Chinese tech giant is exploring the idea of licensing its smartphone designs to third parties according to a report by Bloomberg.

With this plan, Huawei intends to license its designs to China Postal Telecommunications Appliances Co.’s (PTAC) Xnova unit. Xnova sells Huawei nova phones and the partnership will possibly evolve into Xnova-branded devices that are based on Huawei’s designs. Another possible partner for Huawei with its smartphone designs is TD Tech Ltd., though both partnerships from TD Tech and PTAC are still ongoing as of this writing.

By going through this strategy, Huawei might be able to gather components like 5G modems and TSMC chipsets without worrying about the restrictions imposed by the US trade ban. In addition, licensing smartphone designs to third-party companies might allow Huawei to bring back Google Services to its devices.

Prior to this, Huawei sold HONOR to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology, which promoted HONOR to buy components from suppliers like Qualcomm and allowed it to have Google services and 5G connectivity for its phones.

Following this development, Huawei engineers have begun redesigning the circuits of some of their key smartphones (like the P-series and Mate series) to adapt processors from Qualcomm and MediaTek. In addition to that, Huawei expects that the partnerships should help improve its smartphone shipments to more than 30 million units by next year.