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2018 was not Huawei’s year, what with deals with major carriers in the US falling through, retailers dropping their phones, and its CFO (and daughter of its founder) being arrested in Canada. The company had initially expressed optimism heading into 2019, but it seems that reality is a lot harsher.
The US Department of Justice has recently announced that they will be pursuing criminal charges against Huawei with regards to a series of federal crimes, such as a conspiracy to steal trade secrets, wired fraud, and obstruction of justice in which Huawei was accused of allegedly trying to move potential witnesses to its “crimes” back to China.
It also appears that the DoJ is working with Canada to extradite Huawei’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, to the US. According to FBI Director Christopher Wray:
“To the detriment of American ingenuity, Huawei continually disregarded the laws of the United States in the hopes of gaining an unfair economic advantage. As the volume of these charges prove, the FBI will not tolerate corrupt businesses that violate the laws that allow American companies and the United States to thrive.”
Even if Huawei should find a way to get out of this, there is also the issue of various bills having been introduced which could effectively prevent Huawei from purchasing US chips and components. We’ve seen how this had previously affected ZTE in a big way, and we imagine that this will impact Huawei negatively as well. Huawei’s founder had previously spoken up about these allegations, insisting that his company would never spy on behalf of China.
Source: Droid-Life (via TechCrunch)
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