Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei: US sanctions will not hurt our core business

Damien Wilde | May 21 2019 - 2:38 am PT

Huawei is having a truly horrid time after the US first blacklisted trade with the Chinese tech firm, then Google revoked its Android license, putting its entire smartphone business at risk.

An official statement from the company suggests that device owners need not be worried about a lack of device support. Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has now issued a pretty confident statement via the state-run Global Times (via Android Authority) suggesting that these relatively harsh US sanctions will not affect the company’s core business.

Zhengfei was far from critical of the overall situation, instead, he praised the US companies for their “contribution” to Huawei’s development over the past decade.

“In such a critical moment, I’m grateful to US companies, as they’ve contributed a lot to Huawei’s development and showed their conscientiousness on the matter,” Ren was quoted as saying.

“As far as I know, US companies have been making efforts to persuade the US government to let them cooperate with Huawei,” he added.

While the temporary license granted to Huawei will be helpful as the company seeks to overturn the trade-ban. For anyone with even a passing interest; it really does remain bleak for their smartphone hardware outside of China without access to integral Google Play Services.

It’s not only smartphone hardware that is affected by this trade ban, as many other laptops and networking hardware produced by the Chinese brand relies heavily on US-developed software and technologies. That includes chipsets developed by Intel and indeed Qualcomm. The usage of internally-developed Kirin chipsets will no doubt help alleviate any pressures moving forward, but it isn’t an immediate solution.