15 thoughts on “Who Stole 5G Technology? Huawei ban has huge impact on semiconductor industry”

1. This tech blog is chock full of little known yet important facts. Especially, that Huawei spent $15.9B on semiconductors last year and that they are the #1 maker of global wireless telecommunications equipment.

   What really blows one’s mind is there are no cellular network equipment makers in U.S and only two in Europe. Both are enumerated in this IEEE techblog post and will surely benefit from Huawei’s political problems.

   What does that tell you for the future of U.S high tech equipment design and manufacturing?

   Lots of credit to this blogger for his research on the topic, which reveals U.S semiconductor and memory market vendors will be severely hurt by the Huawei ban. Or is Huawei a bargaining chip (a pawn?) in the U.S. – China trade war?

2. S&P has warned that the United States’ Huawei ban is more likely to hit US suppliers to Huawei than telcos that will have to spend more money post-ban.

   In its report, S&P said the ban could force Beijing to boost Chinese technology investment and reduce reliance on foreign suppliers.

   “In turn, this could heighten competition in the technology sector and potentially lower the long-term growth prospects of US technology firms,” the report said.

   S&P highlighted component suppliers such as Micron, Qorvo, and Lumentum had approximately 15% of their revenue exposed to Huawei, along with Qualcomm which has exposure in the range of 5% to 10%.

   “In the next one to two years, we believe US semiconductor firms will take the biggest hit because many of them count Huawei as a key customer,” S&P said.

   “The ban adds a headwind to an industry in the middle of a correction due to weak demand after a strong 2018, above-average inventories both at manufacturers and in the supply chain, and elevated tariffs on Chinese imports under the current US-China trade dispute.”

   “If reports of a 5G gap are true, operators in markets facing Huawei restrictions could theoretically see higher equipment spending or delays in 5G implementation. But given the lack of value-added, 5G-ready use case applications, our forecast for 5G investment and customer appetite is bearish, so any incremental increase cost or delay should be nonmaterial to the ratings.”

   Even in markets where Huawei has decent penetration, like Europe and Africa, the report said there would be minimal impact from banning the Chinese vendor.

   “Due to slower consumer technology adoption and weaker fixed-mobile prospects, we think scaled European 5G deployment will lag that in the Asia-Pacific and US, meaning that we expect rollouts to proceed at a restrained pace until monetizable use cases emerge,” it said.

   “This should help to minimise the costs and delays stemming from Huawei equipment restrictions. European governments are still debating Huawei bans.”

   On Apple, S&P said it does not believe Cupertino has the capacity to move its manufacturing out of the Middle Kingdom in the intermediate term.

   “Though we believe the short-term consequences for technology and telecom companies are manageable, the long-term stakes, particularly for tech, could be decisive,” S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Mark Habib said.

   “The consequences for telecom are likely to vary from country to country and largely relate to longer-term 5G investment decisions, which give operators more time and options for managing the fallout.”

   See: US-China tariffs hit Taiwanese tech industry

   At the recent Computex event in Taiwan, a number of component manufacturers told ZDNet they are in the midst of moving manufacturing out of mainland China and onto the island.

   In good news for the Chinese giant, last week the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers reinstalled approval for Huawei employees to participate in its processes.

   Huawei has filed a motion seeking to have the section of the US’s National Defense Authorization Act 2019 (NDAA) affecting it be dismissed as unconstitutional. That section enforces a ban on US federal agencies and their contractors from using Huawei equipment due to security concerns.

   In the motion, Huawei argues that section 889 of the NDAA specifically targets Huawei, saying the legislation disrupts the company’s existing contracts; stigmatises the company and its employees as supposed tools of the Chinese government; and seriously threatens the company’s ability to do business in the US.

   “They are using every tool they have, including legislative, administrative, and diplomatic channels. They want to put us out of business,” Huawei chief legal officer Song Liuping said in a statement made last month.

   https://www.zdnet.com/article/s-p-warns-huawei-ban-will-hit-us-tech-long-term/

3. U.S. companies have NO meaningful presence in the 5G cellular equipment business. Also, it is hard to make a convincing private-investment case in US-based cellular equipment industry, especially when the industry is several years behind several global telecom equipment companies e.g. Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and ZTE.

   The Trump administration has singled out the Chinese company Huawei, charged it with stealing U.S. intellectual property, and being a national security (spying) threat. The latter claim is probably because Huawei is presumed to be significantly owned by the Chinese government. While the U.S. administration has restricted sales to Huawei by U.S. companies and urged U.S. allied countries to suspend all business engagements with Huawei, it has not provided any particular evidence to substantiate its charges against the Chinese company.

   This blog makes a clear case that banning Huawei, in all likelihood, would be a lose-lose proposition. Short of conclusive proof of US charges I don’t believe the Huawei ban will stand over time.

4. Exhaustion of LTE will push migration towards 5G: Nokia
   Romita Majumdar from Mumbai (Bombay), India. Business Standard

   The internet data boom and rising consumption of content and related services will eventually lead 4G LTE resources to exhaust, leaving operators no choice but to adopt 5G networks, said Alexander Tikhonov (vice-president and global head of customer solutions architects at Nokia).

   Last week, Nokia confirmed its position with 42 commercial 5G deals (more than any other wireless telecom equipment vendor has announced) in place with operators around the world, 22 with named customers such as T-Mobile, Telia Company, and Softbank. Including these deals, Nokia’s 5G deals, trials and demos total over 100 5G customer engagements to date.

   “The data consumption (in India and globally) is video centred on internet devices at very high quality. That will exhaust LTE spectrum at a point in time in near future, that is, between 2021 and 2023 as per studies across most countries. And they will need to shift to 5G to satisfy consumer demand,” said Tikhonov.

   According to a recent Assocham-PwC report, data consumption in India will grow from 7.2 million MB in 2017 to 1.09 billion MB (megabytes) in 2022, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 72.6 per cent. While internet penetration is increasing in India, with mobile internet penetration set to reach 56.7 per cent in 2022, from a mere 30.2 per cent in 2017, with video-on-demand driving usage.

   In fact, according a Nokia report last year, video streaming constitutes up to 75 per cent of the data traffic. According to telecom experts, the humongous video streaming levels is also a reason for rising network congestion (even for voice services) in the country.

   While incumbent telecom operators like Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea (VIL) have been up in arms against 5G spectrum auction in the near future due to a financial crunch in the sector, Reliance Jio has been quite vocal about going ahead with 5G trials.

   Bharti Airtel hopes that the Centre will bring down the proposed base price for the 5G auctions for the company to consider participating in the airwave sale. In a recent investor conference call Gopal Vittal, chief executive officer of Bharti Airtel, said that since 5G requires large quantity of spectrum and investments in the range of ~50000-55,000 crore and “clearly these are prices we can’t afford as they are exorbitant, we hope the government will bring down pricing and then we will look seriously at 5G”.

   While spectrum cost is a concern, telecos are also bidding on data usage as a means to grow revenue and usage over voice services.

   Airtel currently has 115 million data subscribers compared, to 306 million of Reliance Jio and 146 million of Vodafone Idea. Airtel, however, has the highest data usage at 11 GB per subscriber per month, compared to 10.9 GB for Jio and 8.8 GB for Vodafone Idea.

   “ With 4G penetration for Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea still at 25-30 per cent of the subscriber base, limited use cases of 5G at present, and a nascent 5G ecosystem, we believe it will be negative for operators to spend over $7 billion on a project offering limited returns,” noted Deepti Chaturvedi, research analyst at CLSA, in a note to investors.

   Further, with 275MHz spectrum available in 3.4-3.6GHz band and only three operators in play, there is enough supply. So, even if Reliance Jio bids in current auctions, incumbents led by Bharti Airtel can purchase spectrum in subsequent auctions.

   Deferring purchase will likely also lead to a cut in price of spectrum. Historically, the govt has cut spectrum prices by 30-40 per cent if it saw no demand in the previous auction, Chaturvedi wrote.

   Operators in South Korea, Japan and China have been granted 100-200MHz spectrum each in the 3.5-3.7GHz band for 5G services. Over past few months, commercialisation of 5G has also started with Korean operators introducing 5G plans and Samsung launching the first commercial 5G smartphone.

   In USA, Verizon launched its mobile 5G service called 5G Ultra Wideband in April in a couple of cities and plans to expand this to another 20 cities in 2019.

5. The long term impact on Western Digital and Micron could be significant, losing such a big customer as Huawei. Thus their stocks are generally down. This could hurt this segment of the US market and put more pressure for China to develop its own supply of NAND and DRAM chips. As is often the case, embargo and trade restrictions often do more damage than create benefit.

   1. Tom, Thanks for your comment which I strongly agree “embargo and trade restrictions often do more damage than create benefit.” Look at the fallout on Broadcom which last week announced revenues would be $2B lower due to the U.S. Huawei ban and license required to sell them any silicon or software.

6. Is China ahead of U.S. in 5G? Well they certainly sent more operating company delegates to the Brazil ITU-R 5D meeting where IMT 2020 RIT/SRITs were progressed!

   China Mobile Communications Corporation
   Mr HU Zhenping, Deputy Manager of Resource Management Division of Technology Department

   Dr ZHANG Yanyan, Senior Engineer

   Mr ZHENG Yi, Project manager

   China Telecommunications Corporation
   Mr QI Fei, Engineer

   China Unicom
   Mr FENG Yi, Manager

   Mr LI Yi, Senior Engineer

   Ms ZHOU Yao, Senior Engineer
   …………………………………………………..
   In sharp contrast, U.S. operators sent ONLY 4 delegates: 2 from AT&T, 1 from T-Mobile, 1 from Sprint. As usual ZERO from Verizon which is an ITU recognized operating agency.

   FCC sent 1 delegate to look after frequency aspects.

7. Taiwan chip company Mediatek makes progress on 5G System on a Chip (SoC), CitiCorp

   Mediatek’s 5G SoC is sampling out to customers in 3Q19. It is expected to start mass production using TSMC’s 7nm technolgy from 1Q20. While it seems the top three smartphone makers are adopting captive chipsets for their 5G smartphones, the accelerating 5G adoption from other smartphone makers benefits the first wave merchandize 5G chipset makers such as Mediatek. Mediatek may see enhanced compeittion from QCOM on 5G.
   However, the business nature of 5G with a higher ASP and a likely better GPM should bode well for Mediatek’s smartphone business in 5G in 2020 and onward. In addition to its first 5G SoC, Mediatek has more SoC products in the pipeline to address different market segments for 5G products. The next 5G SoC will be available in the market in 1H20.

8. Huawei to ship over 2 million “5G” base stations by 2020; Android vs HarmonyOS?
   https://techblog.comsoc.org/2019/08/21/huawei-to-ship-over-2-million-5g-base-stations-by-2020-android-vs-harmonyos/

9. Huawei claims AI leadership with launch of Ascend 910 chip and MindSpore

   Networking giant Huawei reckons the new Ascend 910 is the world’s most powerful AI processor.

   The chip was launched alongside ‘an all-scenario AI computing framework’ called MindSpore at an event positioned as the realisation of the AI strategy announced in October of last year. “Everything is moving forward according to plan, from R&D to product launch,” said Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu. “We promised a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio. And today we delivered, with the release of Ascend 910 and MindSpore. This also marks a new stage in Huawei’s AI strategy.”

   Huawei chucked around a few datapoints involving things like Teraflops, to support its claim that the Ascend 910 kicks AI ass. It also consumes around 10% less power than Huawei had previously expected it to. “Ascend 910 performs much better than we expected,” said Xu. “Without a doubt, it has more computing power than any other AI processor in the world.”

   MindSpore is not the omniscient, Skynet-like AI platform implied by the slightly creepy name, but an AI development platform. Among its priorities are flexibility, security and privacy protection and it’s designed to be used to develop AI stuff across both devices and the cloud.

   For obvious reasons anything Huawei announces these days features liberal references to the importance of security and privacy. “MindSpore will go open source in the first quarter of 2020,” said Xu. “We want to drive broader AI adoption and help developers do what they do best.”

   At the same event Xu reportedly addressed the impact of all the US aggro on its bottom line. Referring specifically to the consumer business unit Xu said he’s optimistic it won’t be as badly affected as previously feared, but that the impact of US sanctions could still be as much as $10 billion in revenue.

   http://telecoms.com/499303/huawei-claims-ai-leadership-with-launch-of-ascend-910-chip-and-mindspore-framework/

10. Huawei is investing roughly $1.5 billion annually in its full-stack AI strategy, according to current rotating chairman Eric Xu.

    Xu said AI is already being deployed in Huawei products, such as wireless network automation and preventive maintenance, as well as in various key technologies in smartphones.

    https://www.lightreading.com/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning/huawei-spending-$15b-annually-on-ai-development/d/d-id/753668?

11. Huawei Is a Paralyzing Dilemma for the West–Western democracies are struggling to balance the geopolitical challenge of China with their need for 5G technology. A common approach is essential.

    Huawei, based in Shenzhen, is not owned by the state — being Chinese, it’s somewhere between collectively and privately owned. It was founded by Ren Zhengfei, who once worked as a researcher for the People’s Liberation Army. But he and his firm insist that Huawei never has built, nor ever would build, so-called “backdoors” into its equipment that would let it spy on, or sabotage, its customers’ networks.

    There are arguments for giving Huawei the benefit of the doubt. First, it tends to be cheaper than its rivals, which include the European companies Ericsson and Nokia Oyj. Second, it seems to be quicker. Earlier this year, Deutsche Telekom AG, a German cellphone operator, claimed that rolling out 5G without Huawei would delay its network by at least two years and add billions in cost.

    Then there’s the risk that excluding Huawei could antagonize China on trade and investment. In Germany, the bureaucracies opposed to Huawei are the spy agencies and the interior ministry, both tasked with security, whereas the economics ministry and the chancellery, both concerned with the overall Sino-German relationship, are more accommodating.

    Finally, there are the principles of fairness and economic openness. There’s no evidence that Huawei has spied on its customers. And part of what makes the West “western,” or at least liberal, is that it doesn’t close its markets to others without good reasons.

    Huawei’s critics, of course, have plenty of reasons for its exclusion. First, it’s implausible that any Chinese company can avoid becoming an arm of the state and the Communist Party. China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017 requires all the country’s companies to “assist” in national intelligence, and to keep that assistance secret. An earlier law defines national security as including economics and culture.

    Second, 5G isn’t any old phone network. Unlike 4G, it’s the infrastructure for machines and devices to talk to one another on the so-called Internet of Things. If it works well, it will make entire cities “smart” and enable autonomous cars to drive themselves through them, all the while exchanging reams of data. Think of the human body: If 4G is the ears, 5G is the entire nervous system. Would you want China to have control over it?

    The fear is not overblown. Whoever provides the software and hardware for 5G will also have a head-start in eventually transferring that prowess into 6G and 7G. And once a technology is baked in, a simple software update could turn a harmless feature into a mole. A banal analogy would be your smartphone, when its maker schedules an update that adds emoticons but suddenly seems to drain the battery much faster — and all of this coincidentally just before the launch of a new model.

    So caution is advisable. Even at the risk of slowing down the roll-out, regulators would be wise to assure diversity among suppliers. They should also ring-fence the most sensitive parts of the infrastructure. Procurement rules can’t discriminate against individual companies, but they should establish criteria of trustworthiness. Suppliers that can’t fully meet them would be allowed to play only in the network’s periphery.

    Just as important, the western allies must coordinate their approach. It makes little sense for, say, Denmark to exclude Huawei while Germany next door includes it. Autonomous cars, trucks and boats, geo-tagged goods in containers, patients with heart monitors: All of these and other connected nodes on the network will be moving across the border, constantly communicating with different “clouds” of server computers in the background. The data have to be safe on both sides of the border.

    The West and its allies must therefore come to a common position on Huawei — and ideally on both China and data security generally. 5G and its successors have an almost utopian potential to solve many human problems. They also have a dystopian potential to turn our freedoms into a surveillance hell. The democracies need to confront this reality.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-23/huawei-s-5g-networks-are-a-paralyzing-dilemma-for-the-west

12. By Brian Fung (edited by Alan J Weissberger for technical correctness and specificity)

    As U.S. officials have pressured allies not to use networking gear from Chinese technology giant Huawei over spying concerns, President Trump has urged American companies to “step up” and compete to provide the next generation of high-speed, low-lag wireless service known as 5G.

    There’s just one problem: Barely any U.S. companies manufacture the technology’s most critical components.

    The absence of a major U.S. alternative to foreign suppliers of 5G networking equipment underscores the growing dominance of Huawei, which has evolved into the world’s biggest supplier of telecom equipment, sparking fears within the Trump administration that a 5G network powered by Huawei’s wireless parts could endanger national security. And it throws into sharp relief the years-long retreat by U.S. firms from that market.

    Carriers such as Sprint and Verizon have moved swiftly to launch (pre-standard) 5G services for consumers. But the wireless networking gear the industry relies on still comes from foreign suppliers: four companies, Sweden’s Ericsson, Finland’s Nokia and China’s Huawei and ZTE, account for two-thirds of the global market for telecom equipment, according to analyst estimates.

    Some U.S. technology giants such as Cisco sell switches and routers that reside in the innermost parts of a carrier’s network. But despite its size, Cisco doesn’t compete in the market for “radio access,” or the wireless infrastructure that allows cell sites to connect with smartphones and other mobile devices.

    “There is no U.S.-based wireless access equipment provider today that builds those solutions,” said Sandra Rivera, a senior vice president at Intel who helps guide the chipmaker’s 5G strategy.

    It’s this part of the Internet ecosystem that is increasingly important as more devices and appliances gain wireless connectivity and smart capabilities. 5G is expected to shape technological innovation for years to come, providing mobile data connections for virtual-reality headsets, driverless cars and more. Proponents say 5G eventually will support download speeds of 1,000 megabits per second, roughly 100 times faster than today’s 4G-LTE standard.

    The rising global demand for 5G equipment highlights how the United States, a technology leader in other respects, is largely absent from the wireless networking industry. It reflects the decline of a once vibrant ecosystem of American companies that formerly went toe-to-toe with the likes of Nokia and Ericsson. And it puts a focus on Chinese firms such as Huawei, whose rise to prominence has come at the expense of Western networking titans and sparked a global campaign by U.S. officials eager to persuade allies not to allow Chinese equipment into their networks.

    At the dawn of the wireless age 30 years ago, U.S. companies jostled for primacy in wireless networking. Companies such as Motorola and Lucent — an offshoot of the old AT&T monopoly — were sources of innovation, exploring new ways of delivering voice and data wirelessly. It was Lucent, for example, that helped introduce Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, a mobile technology that promised to improve the capacity of wireless carriers.

    But their fortunes declined around the turn of the century as they failed to keep pace with a changing market. No U.S. company stepped in to fill the gap as those companies faded — partly because of the growing strength of foreign alternatives and partly because of the immense scale required to survive in that line of business, according to industry experts.

    “Lucent basically collapsed because they didn’t have a big enough wireless arm to keep them afloat when the Internet backbone [business] collapsed” in the dot-com bust, said Roger Entner, a telecom analyst at Recon Analytics. “Motorola, over time, simply became less competitive because the other vendors had more economies of scale.”

    Motorola and Lucent’s wireless infrastructure businesses were soon gobbled up by Finland’s Nokia and France’s Alcatel, respectively. One reason the European companies proved so successful, Entner said, was because the European industry agreed from the start to develop a common standard for wireless communication, known as GSM, that all European telecoms would share. By contrast, the industry in North America took a looser approach, with some carriers backing network technologies that weren’t mutually compatible.

    Take CDMA. First developed for mobile use in the 1990s, the standard was technologically superior, allowing carriers such as Verizon to pump more traffic through their cell sites over the same amount of time compared with alternative standards. But the technology created headaches for consumers who found they couldn’t keep their phones when they switched from Verizon to a network like T-Mobile’s, which ran on GSM.

    While the American approach allowed for more technological experimentation and innovation, a fragmented market based on competing standards made it more challenging for U.S. wireless equipment sellers to amass a large customer base.

    Today, Nokia and Ericsson are the top providers of telecommunications networking gear in North America and are No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, in the world. The two companies each recorded revenue of about $25 billion last year.

    But both have been surpassed by Huawei, which in the span of three decades has become the world’s largest provider of telecom equipment.

    “I do think the Western companies did underestimate how credible Huawei was,” said Paul de Sa, a telecom industry analyst and co-founder of the advisory firm Quadra Partners. “There were executives who basically laughed [at the idea] that Huawei or ZTE could compete.”

    Founded in the late 1980s by Ren Zhengfei, a former engineer for the Chinese military, Huawei began as a technology supplier for Chinese customers. But by the early 2000s, Huawei had begun selling globally, and now does a robust business not only in network equipment but also in consumer smartphones and enterprise services. Last month, the privately held company reported that it had finished 2018 with revenue of $107 billion, up 20 percent despite the U.S. campaign. Profits rose 25 percent, the company said, to $8.8 billion.

    To give another perspective on Huawei’s enormous influence, the company’s chief rivals, Nokia and Ericsson, account for 17 percent and 13 percent of the global market for telecom equipment, respectively, according to figures compiled by the research firm Dell’Oro Group.

    Huawei’s market share, at 29 percent, is nearly as large as both of them combined.

    Despite an early reputation for cheap knockoff hardware, Huawei today is recognized for low prices, reliable equipment and engaging customer service, analysts say. As Huawei has invested in its own research and development, even Western telecom companies acknowledge that Huawei’s products are as good as — if not better than — competing equipment from Nokia or Ericsson.

    “About 25 percent of our members have Huawei or ZTE” in their networks, Carri Bennet, an attorney for the Washington-based Rural Wireless Association, told lawmakers at a recent House Judiciary subcommittee hearing.

    Gordon Smith, the chief executive of Sagent, a network intelligence and analytics company formerly known as Clover Telecom, estimated that Huawei gear typically costs “tens of percents” less than the competition’s.

    With the support of China’s state-owned development bank, Huawei also has been able to undercut competitors with attractive financing for its products. In February alone, Huawei announced partnerships with wireless carriers in eight countries, including Iceland, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

    It doesn’t hurt that Huawei serves a massive domestic market in China, which grants it tremendous advantages of scale that many tech companies, including American ones, are hungry to access themselves. China is so critical to Apple, for example, that the iPhone maker blamed the country’s economic slowdown for a downward revision in Apple’s recent quarterly sales estimates — the company’s first such warning in 15 years.

    Huawei’s success, however, has been clouded by allegations of intellectual property theft.  The U.S. government accused two Huawei units this year of trying to copy a robotic arm used by T-Mobile to test smartphones. (Huawei has pleaded not guilty.) In the past, Huawei has also been accused of stealing technology from Cisco; the two firms became locked in a legal dispute in 2003 and settled months later, after Huawei conceded that Cisco-made code had ended up in a Huawei product. The code was later removed.

    Then there is Nortel Networks’ discovery in 2004 that hackers — traced to IP addresses in Shanghai — had stolen nearly 1,500 sensitive files from the Canadian telecom giant’s computer systems. The company’s subsequent investigation failed to prove China’s direct involvement, much less Huawei’s. But after analyzing the stolen files — which bore cryptic names such as “Photonic Crystals and Large Scale Integration,” “Eco_Strategy.ppt” and “HDX R2 Standard Reconfigurations Test Plan – Draft 0.2″ — and a months-long probe, Nortel’s security adviser at the time, Brian Shields, became convinced Huawei benefited indirectly from the breach. The file names, a list of which Shields provided to The Washington Post, have not been previously reported.

    “Nobody would be interested in these kinds of documents other than a competitor,” Shields said. “In my opinion, looking at what the hackers went after, it is likely these documents made it to Huawei.”   That seemingly ancient history is newly relevant, as U.S. officials argue that incorporating Huawei gear into U.S. carriers’ 5G networks poses a significant spying risk.

    At an industry conference in Barcelona in February (WMC 2019), U.S. officials urged allies in bilateral meetings not to use Huawei equipment over concerns that it could enable eavesdropping by authoritarian regimes. U.S. partners largely acknowledge the risk but have asked for more concrete evidence to back up the case.

    “The Europeans really keep pushing for this concept of, ‘Where’s the smoking gun?’ ” said a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely about the closed-door meetings. “They say, ‘Hey, we don’t want security threats either … but you can’t just come in here and tell us that there is a unity of interest between Beijing and Huawei and have that be the end of your presentation.’ ”

    Some analysts say that in a previous era, America’s allies might have been more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s message. But Trump’s conduct, they say — berating NATO allies, canceling a visit to a World War I memorial because of rain, calling Europe a “foe” on trade — has not helped.

    “In a world where the U.S. had more soft power,” Entner said, “I’m pretty sure the Europeans would be a lot more receptive.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/10/us-spat-with-huawei-explained/

13. Thank you for sharing this information. In particular that the Huawei ban will hurt revenue and profits of U.S. semiconductor companies.

14. Trump Extends Huawei Ban:
    President Trump inked an extension to the US government’s ban on American companies’ business with China’s Huawei. The move essentially prevents US companies from doing business with Huawei through May 2021.

    As Reuters reported, the action invokes the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, positioning China’s Huawei and ZTE as threats to national security. According to Reuters, the US Commerce Department is also preparing to extend the waivers it has provided to select US companies that will allow them to continue working with Huawei.

    Hanging over the situation is the ongoing US-China trade war, a situation now further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic that originated in China.

    Trump’s action is noteworthy in light of a number of new developments, including reports that US companies may be given a green light to work with Huawei and other Chinese companies on 5G standards. And, separately, there are ongoing discussions about a government-funded program to pull Huawei equipment out of some US wireless operator networks and replace it with equipment from “trusted” suppliers.

    https://www.lightreading.com/security/trump-extends-huawei-ban-to-may-2021/d/d-id/759625?

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