The Chinese tech giant, Huawei Technologies, which was once the leading smartphone brand in the world (in Q2 2020), is now practically out of the smartphone business because of the trade restrictions imposed by the United States.

To ensure that its sub-brand Honor survives, the company sold it off to Zhixin New Information Technology Co. Ltd. After its split, it retained almost all of its employees, which are over 8,000, including some of the company’s executives.

According to some media reports, the company is now in talks with several companies to streamline its supply chain and production. Now, Honor CEO George Zhao Ming has confirmed that it is in talks with Google and will soon have Google Mobile Services (GMS) support for its devices.

Given that Honor is no longer a part of Huawei, the company will be able to get access to Google’s software and services. For those who are unaware, Huawei was banned from using Google’s services because of the sanctions imposed by the United and since Honor was a sub-brand of Huawei, it too wasn’t permitted to use Google‘s offerings.

Honor’s CEO has also reiterated what he said when the company was becoming independent — to become a leader in the market. Honor is looking to compete against its former parent company Huawei as well as Apple, as it is eying for the pole position in the Chinese smartphone market.

Apart from Google, the company is also in talks with other companies for the needed components, including Qualcomm for chipsets. It recently launched its own online storage named Honor Mall and is in the process of setting up several new offline stores.