Huawei’s woes may be ending
Huawei has had a rough few months, all thanks to the US Department of Commerce putting the company on an Entity List, essentially blacklisting them from doing business from US firms like Google, Qualcomm, Broadcomm, and Microsoft, among others. For a while, Huawei’s access to US technologies was uncertain, with consumer confidence plummeting amid a sea of uncertainty about the company’s ability to buy critical hardware and license software that kept their phones and notebooks running.
That fog has lifted thanks to an announcement by President Donald Trump a few weeks ago, which sounded like Huawei was being taken off the entity list. But like anything regarding the trade ban, it’s a little more complicated than that, and the simple fact of the matter is that Huawei is still on the US Govt’s entity list.
To get around that, the US is said to start approving licenses required for companies like Qualcomm and others to re-start sales to Huawei in as little as two weeks, according to a report in Reuters. Those licenses are required to deal with companies that are in the US’ entity list, and while they could have been applied for in the past, they would have been certainly denied before Trump’s announcement.
Many US firms do business with Huawei, and the Chinese company spent $11 billion on US technology back in 2018. US companies want to start normal trading relations with Huawei again, with many of them arguing that US security goals should be advanced in a way that does not undermine the ability to compete globally and retain technological leadership.
Huawei on their part says that they have not been found guilty of any relevant wrongdoing, with a spokesman saying “the Entity list restrictions should be removed altogether, rather than have temporary licenses applied for US vendors.
