Almost four years ago Huawei’s via crucis began. The company has been the scapegoat in the trade war between the US and China. The ban on Huawei was important but not complete, and the company was still able to import some chips (such as 4G) and technologies (such as Windows) to develop its products. The nightmare for the Chinese company began with Donald Trump’s executive order, but the Biden administration has just gone even further and turned Huawei into a pariah company. While some sources say that the extension of the veto is done, others say that the decision is not yet final.
first it was google. The search giant announced in May 2019 that it was stopping offering its services and applications to the Chinese company, launching a missile at the waterline of its mobile phone division. At that time, Huawei was already an absolute mobility giant, but that coup ended up sinking that business and threatening it with death.
You spy, I spy, we all spy. Trump’s argument for activating the blockade was compelling: Huawei was spying on the US, and its 5G infrastructure was going to be an even more powerful tool to achieve it. The accusations were never proven, and the irony here is what was proven years ago is that the US had spied on millions of people with secret programs like PRISM or XKeyscore. He did not care: the veto was maintained and extended to many other companies that blocked exports to Huawei. Intel or Qualcomm, for example, stopped supplying certain chips.
With Biden things have gotten worse. When the Biden administration took over, there was some hope that that veto would end. Far from it, the new US president declared that he saw no reason to lift it, and now he has just gone further and expanded it.
In 4G, in Wi-Fi 6. The blocking of export licenses from US companies to Huawei now affects not only 5G chips, but also 4G or Wi-Fi 6 chips. Nor will it be allowed to export technologies in full development such as Wi-Fi 7, artificial intelligence or security solutions. high performance computing and cloud computing.
More problems for Huawei mobiles. Until now, export licenses for 4G chips that could not be used for 5G connections have been offered, but those licenses began to be denied last year. The veto has been gradually extended, but for example it allowed the export of telecommunications equipment to Huawei, as happened in 2021, when they sold 61,000 million pieces of equipment of this type.
The scope is still unknown. The new measures of the Biden administration pose more problems for a Huawei that despite the coup years ago was still very relevant in the technological landscape and that was trying to raise its head with solutions such as HarmonyOS. The chip war has been expanding and countries like the Netherlands or Japan have been fully involved in it. It is still not entirely clear what the scope and impact of the measures will be, but of course this significantly complicates Huawei’s operations and strategy outside of China.
