Amidst plans of expanding in Europe, Huawei is facing yet another ban. This time, The smartphone manufacturer is facing complications with Spain’s Ministry of Defense. It arrives after the US ban, which occurred during the US-China trade disputes, that had seen the company being placed on the ‘Entity List’ by the US Commerce Department.

Huawei US-China

To clarify, the Chinese tech giant is not banned from selling their smartphones to its Spanish customers. Although, the company’s devices have their access banned from the Spanish Government’s data servers which incudes employee emails. According to the report, a few members of the Ministry of Defense are still allowed to retain their Huawei handset for personal use but have been specifically instructed to use other devices to access data from the Ministry’s data servers (like emails). Members that are still using the Huawei smartphones to access such data must ‘immediately disconnect.’

Unlike the US which accused Huawei of espionage, Spain did not cite the exact reason for the ban. However, the reasons might be similar if they are considering the prevention of sensitive data leaks. Furthermore, a spokesperson from Huawei went on record to say that the company had never faced any cyber-security related issues in the past 30 years of its operations in over 170 countries; and “security” is the highest priority of Huawei.

Huawei Mate X 5G
Huawei Mate X 5G

Although this arrives as a sour moment for the company, Huawei is still second in position in terms of smartphone shipments in Europe in Q3 of 2019. The company is seeing steady growth in the region and even more so in China.

 

(Source)