TAIPEI -- China's Honor, the former budget handset line of Huawei Technologies, is set for its first global smartphone launch on Thursday since being spun off from its embattled parent to skirt U.S. export controls on vital components.

Honor's Magic 3 series will adopt Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 Plus 5G mobile platform, the U.S. mobile chip giant's most premium mobile processor. Domestic rival Xiaomi, the world's second-largest smartphone maker, uses the same processor platform in its latest high-end smartphone, the Mix 4, unveiled on Tuesday.

The launch is scheduled to be streamed online Thursday evening from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, where Honor is headquartered.

The high-end phone underscores Honor's intention to regain the global market share that Huawei lost due to Washington's tech crackdown.

Honor and Xiaomi are showcasing their phones the same week that Samsung Electronics, their biggest rival, launched a series of foldable smartphones costing less than $1,000. The move demonstrates the South Korean company's tech prowess in the increasingly competitive handset market. Samsung is the world's biggest smartphone maker.

Apple, the world No. 3 smartphone maker, is slated to release its next iPhone in September. Huawei, once the world's top smartphone maker, late last month unveiled its flagship P50 smartphone -- which was delayed from the start of the year -- but was forced to drop the 5G communication standard due to U.S. sanctions.

Huawei in November sold Honor to a consortium led by the Shenzhen local government to help the division secure access to critical American chips as well as to Google's popular Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and Google Play apps, which are critical for overseas expansion.

In January, Honor said it had legally secured vital chips from Qualcomm, Sony, MediaTek, Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, while it aggressively spoke to suppliers across the region to secure more components for future products.

The company's Honor 50 handset, which was launched earlier this year, mainly in China, uses a mobile processor from Qualcomm and adopts Google's Android operating system.

However, a group of more than 10 Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives last week asked the Commerce Department to add Honor to the government's trade blacklist, citing its Huawei links. Honor says it is a fully independent company.

"It's too soon to judge whether Honor could further suffer these geopolitical woes, but we think its U.S. suppliers will lobby the government not to do that as the business is growing there," Eddie Han, an analyst with Isaiah Research, told Nikkei Asia. "We think Honor still has some good opportunities to build high-end phones because it has secured good engineering power and talent when it became independent from Huawei last year."

In January, Honor said it had secured an 8,000-strong workforce when it spun off from Huawei.

Honor's total smartphone shipments reached 78 million units in 2018 and 68.7 million in 2019, when it and then parent Huawei made up the world's second-largest smartphone maker, according to Counterpoint Research.

But last year it suffered significant headwinds as Washington tightened export controls to cut off all of Huawei's access to American technologies. Honor's handset shipments dropped to 50 million units.

For the three months ended June, Honor's global shipments dropped a further 54.7% from the year-earlier period, Counterpoint Research analyst Archie Zhang told Nikkei Asia.

"But the current growth momentum is strong in China as the company's sales were up 39% month-over-month in May and 27% month-over-month in June," Zhang said. "We do see the company prove that it has made substantial progress in addressing the [chip] supply issue."

Currently, around 85% of Honor's sales come from China, Zhang added.

Isaiah Research's Han said that while Honor aspires to retake Huawei's lost overseas market share, "it will still take a bit of time and a lot of effort for Honor to grow its overseas market as all of its domestic rivals, from Xiaomi and Oppo to Realme, are all there to seize those markets that Huawei was forced to give up due to the U.S. crackdown."