A recent report alleged that Huawei was planning to trim down its workforce in the US. Huawei operates in the US under its subsidiary known as Futurewei. Futurewei is Huawei’s research arm and was in the news recently when it made moves to extricate itself from Huawei’s brand identity. The company has now reportedly announced worker layoffs on Monday, according to two Futurewei employees.
This sad development is coming barely two months after the U.S. government put Huawei on a trade blacklist, making it illegal for its U.S. subsidiary to transfer sensitive technologies to its parent. The blacklist also restricts Huawei from purchasing products from U.S. technology companies. One of the employees even disclosed that work came to a standstill since May 17 when the company was blacklisted. In his words; “On the 17th of May, Huawei asked everyone at Futurewei to upload everything to the Huawei cloud, right before the ban took effect….After that basically, Futurewei has stopped doing any work – almost stopped everything.”
The layoff will see 70% of the 850 workers under Futurewei’s payroll let go, an employee revealed. The employee also indicated that the layoff list had been sent from Huawei’s headquarters in China. Apart from workers layoffs, Huawei is also terminating any open source projects, projects related to near-term Huawei products, and any research and development in critical technology.
Futurewei runs several research labs in the US and partners several US universities in research and development. Futurewei has offices in Silicon Valley and the greater Seattle, Chicago and Dallas areas. Futurewei has filed more than 2,100 patents in such areas as telecommunications, 5G cellular networks, and video and camera technologies, according to data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Huawei is yet to release an official statement about this latest development.
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