BEIJING, January 31 (TMTPOST) The U.S. government is considering stopping granting licenses to Huawei's US suppliers, to completely cut off Huawei from importing any US products, according to reports on Monday.
Relevant discussions are still in the preliminary stage and there is no conclusion yet.
"Although there has not been a rule, the U.S. is tightening its supplies to Huawei now," a person familiar with the license application said.
Several people familiar with US export licence applications said US companies are still applying to the US Department of Commerce (DOC) to export to Huawei, but some approvals were delayed.
The DOC put Huawei on a trade blacklist on May 16, 2019, to restrict most U.S. suppliers from shipping goods and technology to the company unless they were granted licenses. The goal is to prevent Huawei from obtaining chips related to 5G technology from the US. However, in areas such as 4G chips and general computing, US companies such as Intel and Qualcomm can still apply for permission from the DOC to continue exporting products to Huawei.
The license issued by the DOC details the names and quantities of products that are allowed to be exported to Huawei.
According to data released by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the DOC issued 113 licenses to Huawei suppliers from November 9, 2020, to April 20, 2021, accounting for 69.3 percent of the total applications (169). The total value of approved goods reached 61.4 billion US dollars. Most of the remaining applications were rejected, accounting for 28.4 percent of the total.
Any disruption to purchases from the US would deal a further blow to Huawei's terminal business. Huawei still sells laptops using Intel chips and Microsoft's operating system, and phones using Qualcomm's 4G chips. The company completed the building of 5G base stations without US components in 2019, so its core carrier business will be hardly impacted.
