U.S. Government to Allow Huawei to Buy From U.S. Suppliers
Huawei has been at the center of the ongoing trade dispute between the United States and China. In May, the U.S. government blacklisted the company from doing business with any U.S.-based companies, leading to many of Huawei’s partners severing ties with the phone maker.
The biggest hit was probably Google suspending its business with Huawei, preventing any future Huawei phones from shipping with Google’s incredibly valuable Play Store services. Other companies later joined Google in suspending business with Huawei, with chipmakers like Qualcomm no longer supplying to the Chinese phone maker.
The U.S. government is now backtracking slightly in the Huawei ban. At the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, president Donald Trump said that the government will once again allow Huawei to buy components from U.S. suppliers. That means companies like Qualcomm and Intel will once again be able to start doing business with Huawei, selling components like the chips that power Huawei’s phones.
“U.S. companies can sell their equipment to Huawei. We’re talking about equipment where there’s no great national security problem with it,” Trump said at the press conference. “We’ve agreed to allow them to continue to sell that product so that American companies will continue,” he later insisted.
President Trump has appeared to soften his tone on Chinese communications giant Huawei, suggesting that he would allow the company to once again purchase US technology https://t.co/4YNJCyKLTg pic.twitter.com/jr45f40ghP
— CNN International (@cnni) June 29, 2019
It still remains unclear whether this means Huawei will be able to continue doing business with Google, and thus getting access to the company’s Play Services. Either way, it suffices to say that Huawei’s trust in the U.S. government has essentially been destroyed, and the company will slowly move on to building its own alternatives to Google’s Play Services that are so crucial for the success of its smartphone business.