After a month-long ban, US president Donald Trump said today that he’ll allow companies to sell equipment to Huawei. He met the Chinese president Xi Jinping at the G20 summit being held in Osaka, Japan.
Trump said at a press conference that he’s only allowing equipment trade in areas where there’s no security risk to the country:
U.S. companies can sell their equipment to Huawei. We’re talking about equipment where there’s no great national security problem with it. I said that’s O.K., that we will keep selling that product, these are American companies that make these products. That’s very complex, by the way. I’ve agreed to allow them to continue to sell that product so that American companies will continue.
For reference, as Android Authority noted, Huawei spent about $11 billion on US-based suppliers in 2018; that included chipsets from the likes of Qualcomm, as well as software from Microsoft.
It’s also worth noting that Huawei remains on the is still on the US Department of Commerce’s “Entity List,” which technically bars it from doing business with firms there. That may change, depending on how talks between the two countries go in the coming days.
It’s not clear at the moment if Google, Qualcomm, Intel, and other companies will resume trading with the Chinese tech giant. We’ve contacted them to learn more, and we’ll update the story accordingly.
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