Huawei, the Chinese giant is still stuck in-between the US-China trade war and is still on the “Entity List” by the United States which bars the company from doing business with US-based firms.
Now, Huawei’s CEO Ren Zhengfei said that the company can survive without the United States and has dismissed Washington’s campaign against it as ineffective. In an interview, he said: “We can survive very well without the U.S. The China-U.S. trade talks are not something I’m concerned with.”
Ren Zhengfei said Huawei isn’t a factor in the trade war because “we have virtually no business dealings in the U.S.” He also said “there has been no confrontation with the U.S.” and said he would welcome a visit from Donald Trump now or after he has left office.
Huawei, which is the world’s largest maker of networking equipment and the world’s second largest smartphone vendor, has also emerged as a central issue in the trade war, and Beijing has insisted on a reprieve as a condition for any deal.
Last year, the Chinese giant bought $11 billion of technology from American suppliers—including software from Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. , and chips from an array of manufacturers. Huawei has now moved to find backup sources and at the same time, the company is working on its own chips and software.
Huawei executives say the company is building its entire portfolio of 5G networking products without any American technology, at a clip of 5,000 base stations a month. The company’s CEO adds that “we don’t expect the U.S. to remove Huawei from the entity list. They may as well keep us there forever because we’ll be fine without them.”
However, the company’s executives say Huawei is still buying technology from American companies. Chips made by U.S. companies at factories offshore, for example, generally aren’t subject to the U.S. restrictions. This has allowed several American companies, including chip makers Intel and Qualcomm to resume sales to Huawei. Will Zhang, Huawei’s president of corporate strategy, said that the purchase of U.S. technology is at 70% to 80% of its previous level.
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Despite efforts from the U.S., Huawei continues to win 5G contracts around the world, while its smartphone sales are booming, especially in its home country China. The smartphone sales are surging despite uncertainty over its continued access to Google’s Android operating system.
While Ren initially forecast a $30 billion revenue hit from the blacklisting for two years, but the company has said revenue for the first nine months of the year was up 24 percent. The United States is defending its actions against Huawei by citing concerns that Beijing could use its equipment for spying.
It also says Huawei would be legally bound to comply with requests for customer data from Beijing. However, Ren has repeatedly denied spying on customers for any government and has said he would deny any such requests from Beijing and insisted that the company has no access to the data that flows through it networks.
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(Via)
