In a recent turn of events for China’s mobile phone brand Huawei, the Biden administration has stopped approving licenses for U.S. companies to export most items for manufacturing and production.
Huawei has faced U.S. export restrictions regarding items for Android 5G and other technologies for several years. Despite that, the U.S. Department of Commerce officials have granted American firms licenses to sell specific goods and technologies to the company. Qualcomm Inc received permission to sell 4G smartphone chips to Huawei in 2020.
A spokesperson from the Department of Commerce stated that officials “continually assess our policies and regulations” but did not comment on talks with specific companies. Huawei and Qualcomm declined to comment.
However, in a recent report, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said that "China opposes the United States abusing an overly broad notion of national security to suppress Chinese firms unreasonably.”
“It goes against the principles of the market economy and rules of international trade and finance, hurts the confidence the international community has in the U.S business environment and is blatant technological hegemony,” Mao elaborated during a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday.
American officials placed Huawei on a trade blacklist in 2019, restricting most U.S. suppliers from shipping goods and technology to the company unless they were granted licenses. According to reports, “officials then continued to tighten the controls to cut off Huawei's ability to buy or design the semiconductor chips that power most of its products.”
However, U.S. officials granted licenses that allowed Huawei to receive some products. For example, suppliers to Huawei got licenses worth $61 billion to sell to the telecom equipment giant from April through November 2021.
In December last year, Huawei announced that its overall revenue was about $91.53 billion, down only slightly from 2021, when U.S. sanctions caused its sales to fall by nearly a third.
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