Jan 30 (Reuters) – The Biden administration has stopped approving licenses for U.S. companies to export most items to China’s Huawei, three people familiar with the matter said.
Huawei has faced US export bans on items for 5G and other technologies for several years, but US Commerce Department officials have licensed some American firms to sell certain products and technologies to the company. Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM.O) In 2020, Huawei received permission to sell 4G smartphone chips.
A Commerce Department spokeswoman said officials “continually evaluate our policies and regulations” but would not comment on discussions with specific companies. Huawei and Qualcomm declined to comment. The move was previously reported by Bloomberg and the Financial Times.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning said China opposes the US abusing the overly broad concept of national security to unreasonably suppress Chinese companies.
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Mao said at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday that the move “goes against the principles of market economy and rules of international trade and finance, hurts the international community’s confidence in the US business environment, and is clearly technological hegemony.”
A person familiar with the matter said US officials are developing a new formal policy of denying items to Huawei that will include items below the 5G level, including 4G items, WiFi 6 and 7, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, and the cloud. item
Another said the move is expected to reflect the Biden administration’s tougher policy on Huawei over the past year. Licenses for 4G chips that cannot be used for 5G, which may have been approved earlier, are being denied, the person said. Late in the Trump administration and early in the Biden administration, officials still granted licenses for specific items for 4G applications.
American officials put Huawei on a trade blacklist in 2019 that bars most US suppliers from shipping products and technology to the company unless it is licensed. Officials continue to tighten controls to curb Huawei’s ability to buy or design the semiconductor chips that power most of its products.
But U.S. officials granted licenses that allow Huawei to receive some products. For example, Huawei’s suppliers received licenses worth $61 billion to sell telecom equipment to the giant April to November 2021.
In December, Huawei said its overall revenue was about $91.53 billion, down slightly from 2021 when US sanctions cut its sales by about a third.
Reporting by Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru, Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, Alexandra Alper and Karen Freifeld in Washington, and Yu Lun Tian in Beijing; Additional reporting by David Kirton in Shenzhen; Edited by Shailesh Kuber, Stephen Coates and Louise Havens
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