SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Huawei, the Chinese manufacturer targeted by a Trump administration trade ban, is expected to dismiss a substantial number of people in the US in the coming weeks.
The number of individuals affected remains unclear but the layoffs, at the telecoms kit maker's US R&D subsidiary, Futurewei Technologies, could affect hundreds of workers in California, Texas, and Washington, according to The Wall Street Journal. Futurewei currently employs more than 800 people in the US.
On May 16, the beleaguered manufacturer, along with 68 of its affiliates, was placed on the US Commerce Department's Entity List, which forbids companies subject to US law from doing business with the firm without special permission from the US government.
Four days later, Huawei was given a 90-day General License so that its customers have time to make deals with new suppliers. When the General License expires on August 19, the ban will go into effect unless circumstances change.
US officials believe Huawei cannot be trusted because the company cannot resist demands by the Chinese government to compromise its equipment to assist with state-sponsored spying. No public evidence of this has been presented.
[...] Layoffs would be consistent with the broader financial impact of the pending Huawei trade ban. In June, at an event at Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, China, company founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, predicted the telecom firm's revenue will reach only about $100bn in 2019 and 2020, about $30bn less than previously anticipated in the next two years. But he said the company will emerge stronger by 2021.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hwertz on Thursday July 18 2019, @04:47PM (5 children)
What about Cisco? Just saying, worrying about Huawei theoretically working for the Chinese gov't is pretty hypocritical when the likes of Cisco are well-known to have helped the Chinese gov't with their national firewall.
I find the current climate disgusting of harping about China's surveillance and Russian companies collecting info, like "Oh those foreign bastards", while the US is running one of the largest surveillance programs on the planet, and the likes of Facebook are gleefully collecting as much info as they can get their hands on with basically a privacy policy of "we'll use the info however we'd like".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @04:56PM
China and Russia would be foolish to trust critical infrastructure to Cisco, but the attacks on Huawei do seem more like retaliation for forced technology transfers and """intellectual property""" theft under a pretense of overly-cautious infrastructure protection.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 18 2019, @05:43PM (1 child)
I think an important factor in the equivalency you are setting up is that people are VOLUNTARILY giving their data to Facebook.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @07:30PM
And Lexus-Nexus? And credit cards? And cell phones?
At what point simply being part of a society is "voluntarily giving your data"? Do you control your parents giving your data? Your friends? Your siblings? Your neighbors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Friday July 19 2019, @01:52AM (1 child)
The reason the US went after Huawei was because Huawei beat the US by 2 years on 5G, which is considired the wholy grale of the new brave internet. Whoever controls 5G controls the world for a foreseable future the theory goes.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday July 19 2019, @11:07AM
Nothing theoretical about it: On the infrastructure side it's 5+ years service contracts with significant improvements in stability and performance due to firmware and parts upgrades that are largely due to the data Huawei gets from running real world trials. On the baseband side it's patents.
compiling...