The Trump administration has just notified numerous Huawei suppliers, including Intel, that their authorization to supply the Chinese manufacturer with components has now been revoked. The full list of the companies concerned is not known at this stage.
Donald Trump may be in an ejection seat two days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, in addition to being subject to a new impeachment procedure, this does not prevent him from making a frantic number of decisions – by decree like all decisions of the White House or almost in recent years. And so it is in this context that we learn that the Department of Commerce has just revoked several export licenses, including that of Intel.
The full list of affected companies is not known, but a dozen overdue applications would also be rejected. The Donald Trump administration has embarked on a violent trade war against China from the start of his term. Huawei, symbol of Chinese success, and very advanced in technologies considered strategic such as 5G, immediately found itself in the heart of the storm.
Huawei, deprived of American suppliers two days before Joe Biden’s inauguration
The United States has thus placed Huawei alongside other Chinese firms such as ZTE on a list of Entities with which American companies are no longer allowed to trade. The US Department of Commerce then began issuing override licenses for avoid that the sanctions are also for American firms, when the supply of components does not concern equipment linked to 5G technologies.
This new round of sanctions seems the heaviest ever at this point against the firm. Huawei has been developing alternatives to American services and technologies for some time. But these do not yet seem quite ready to completely replace current solutions. We can cite here the efforts of Huawei around its mobile OS Harmony OS 2.0 whose first Developers Preview are available.
Read also: Huawei – Donald Trump extends sanctions until May 2021
The long-term consequences of this latest round of sanctions are unclear. Joe Biden is indeed due to take office on Wednesday January 20, 2021, and even if we expect some continuity in relations with China, it is not said that the new administration really feels bound by decisions hastily taken at the end of such a sulphurous presidency.
Source: Bloomberg
