The Huawei ban explained - A complete timeline and everything you need to know - Android
If you’ve been following the tech industry over the past year, you no doubt know that Huawei is in a heap of trouble. Since May of 2019, the Chinese company has been under fire from the Trump administration in the United States, resulting in what is colloquially referred to as the “Huawei ban.” This ongoing battle has forced Huawei to drastically change its business practices.
If you are curious as to how the Huawei-US ban came to be, the details surrounding the ban, and what it means for Huawei going forward, this is the place to be.
Below, you’ll find all the integral info related to the ban. We’ve also got some helpful tips specifically related to Huawei’s smartphones and how the ban affects both current and future handsets.
Editor’s note: This Huawei ban summary is current as of August 2020. Since this is an ongoing situation, we will update it with new content regularly. However, for the most up-to-date info on Huawei, we advise you to check our latest Huawei news articles.
See also: US-China trade war: Why every Chinese phone maker should prepare for the worst
Although this article is an in-depth examination of the Huawei ban, you might be happy with a shortened version of the story. The basic gist is as follows:
With the Huawei-US ban in effect, the company has had to completely revamp how it creates and releases smartphones. It also faces mounting scrutiny from other nations, many of which rely on Huawei for wireless networking equipment.
Since May 2019, nothing has significantly changed. It appears the Huawei ban will be in effect in perpetuity and the company will need to strategize around it until something changes.
In the grand scheme of things, Huawei is a relatively young company. Ren Zhengfei started Huawei in 1987 after he was discharged from the People’s Liberation Army in China. Zhengfei’s military history helped Huawei get some of its first big contracts. This is one of the main reasons Huawei is viewed as a de facto branch of the Chinese government.
Huawei has faced scrutiny from the beginning for allegedly stealing intellectual property. In brief, the company would be accused repeatedly over the decades of stealing technology from other companies and then passing it off as its own. There are a few times where this has been proven, such as with a 2003 case filed by Cisco, but there are many other times where accusations didn’t lead to confirmation.
Related: Huawei’s controversial history: The timeline you need to know
In the late 2000s, Huawei was growing at an incredibly fast pace. The company started acquiring other companies to expand its operations. Several times, it attempted to buy non-Chinese companies and the sale would be blocked by regulatory bodies. This happened in the US and UK, among other areas. Each time, the reasoning behind the block would be related to Huawei’s deep ties to China and the possible security threat that represents.
Eventually, Huawei started making smartphones. Its phones became popular immediately as they were well-designed devices with very reasonable price tags. In 2016, Huawei boasted it would be the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer within five years. By 2018, it had taken second place ahead of Apple and just behind Samsung. This is a remarkable feat considering Huawei was handicapped by not having any presence in the United States, now the world’s third-largest market.
While Huawei was growing at an astounding rate in 2018, all was not well in regards to its home country. Donald Trump started to flex his power as POTUS to combat China and its “unfair trade practices,” as he called them. This began the still-ongoing US/China trade war.
Although the trade war has a lot to do with politics, tariffs, and international law, it also touches on intellectual property theft. Since Huawei has a reputation as a repeat offender when it comes to IP theft, this put the company in Trump’s crosshairs.
A major aspect of the US/China trade war is IP theft, something that has dogged Huawei's reputation for decades.
However, critics at the time noted that a long-term US/China trade war would hurt both countries significantly. Because of this, it was assumed that Trump would try to strongarm deals from China that would be advantageous to the US and then be done with it. This isn’t how things went, though.
Despite the fact that the trade war is associated very closely with Donald Trump, it is actually one of the few moves he has made that has bipartisan support. Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden previously declared that he supports active monitoring of trade with China. Recently, he tried to say that he would remove Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products if elected president, but his staff walked back the statement.
This suggests that even when the day comes when Trump is no longer president, the trade war could still continue.
On May 15, 2019, President Trump issued an executive order that bans the use of telecommunications equipment from foreign firms deemed a national security risk. The order itself doesn’t mention Huawei (or even China) specifically. However, the US Department of Commerce created what it refers to as an “Entity List” related to the order that does contain Huawei’s name.
Since the order didn’t reference Huawei specifically, its effect on the company and its various lines of business wasn’t totally clear. It appeared the order was mostly directed towards Huawei’s telecom operations, which would mean its wireless networking equipment, especially those related to 5G.
Trump's executive order for the Huawei ban left out many crucial details.
The order also didn’t make it clear whether the US government would help carriers pay for the removal of Huawei equipment. It also didn’t clarify any punishments US companies would face if they didn’t comply with the order. In brief, the Huawei ban seemed serious but there were too many unknowns to understand where it would go.
Huawei, in a statement to Android Authority that day, said this: “Restricting Huawei from doing business in the US will not make the US more secure or stronger; instead, this will only serve to limit the US to inferior yet more expensive alternatives, leaving the US lagging behind in 5G deployment.” Even this statement made it seem like Trump’s order was only going to apply to Huawei’s networking gear and not its smartphones or other products.
That all changed a few days later.
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