Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has said he is ‘confident’ that the Chinese tech giant can ‘survive further attacks’ from the US while claiming that Washington may step up its campaign against the company. He stressed that even if the US expands the scope of restrictions on it, the impact on business will be minimal. The Trump Administration has targeted Huawei and alleged that Huawei products pose a threat to national security and its networking equipment could be used for espionage by the Chinese government. The company has denied the allegations.
‘This year the U.S. might further escalate their campaign against Huawei, but I feel the impact on Huawei’s business would not be very significant. This year in 2020, since we already gained experience from last year and we got a stronger team, I think we are more confident that we can survive even further attacks,’ Ren said at the World Economic Forum in Davos (via CNBC). Reportedly, the US has been pressuring its allies to block Huawei from installing infrastructure for 5G network.
Last year, the US put Huawei on an entity list which meant that all US-based companies were barred from doing business with Huawei. As a result, Google announced that Huawei won’t be able to ship its smartphones with Android OS. Later, the Chinese tech giant launched its own operating system called HarmonyOS and has been inking deals to refine it.
As a part of this process, Huawei penned a deal with Dutch navigation and digital mapping company TomTom to use its maps and services in smartphone apps. Citing TomTom spokesman Remco Meerstra, Reuters reported that the deal was closed some time ago but had not been made public.
According to Ren, Huawei has spent ‘hundreds of billions’ to prepare a ‘plan B,’ which helped the company to survive. ‘If we had this sense of security from the US, we did not have the need to come up with these back up plans. Since we didn’t have that sense of security, we spent hundreds of billions to put our own plan B. That’s why we withstood the first round of attack,’ the executive added.
