The Biden administration has revoked licenses from eight companies that had allowed them to ship products to Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei this year, according to documents first reported by Reuters, in a move aimed at pressuring the Chinese company as it tries to make a comeback.
Marco Jurica | Reuters
The Biden administration has revoked licenses from eight companies that allowed them to ship products to Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei this year, according to documents first reported by Reuters, in a move aimed at pressuring the Chinese company as it tries to make a comeback.
The Commerce Department, which oversees U.S. export policy, said it had revoked “certain” licenses in May, as first reported by Reuters, but did not disclose the names or number of suppliers affected. Qualcomm and Intel Reuters reported at the time that these too had been cancelled.
“Since the beginning of 2024, (the Department of Commerce) has revoked eight additional licenses involving Huawei,” the department said in a statement prepared in response to questions from Republican Rep. Michael McCaul.
In the document, the license approvals for Huawei include “low-technology components for mass-market consumer products such as exercise equipment, office furniture, and tablet touchpads and touchscreen sensors,” which are widely available in China from domestic and overseas suppliers, the Commerce Department said.
Huawei and Qualcomm did not respond to requests for comment. Intel declined to comment. A spokesman for the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which McCaul chairs, said it received the data on Tuesday and was reviewing it.
The details shed new light on steps the Biden administration is taking to rein in Huawei as the company begins to make a comeback despite Washington’s efforts to undermine it on national security grounds. Huawei denies it is a security risk.
It also comes as Republican China hawks in Congress are stepping up pressure to attack the company, which stunned the industry last August with a new phone that used advanced chips made by Chinese semiconductor makers. SMIC This is despite U.S. export restrictions on both companies.
The phone helped Huawei’s smartphone sales grow 64% year-over-year in the first six weeks of 2024, according to research firm Counterpoint. The company’s smart car parts business has also contributed to Huawei’s resurgence, with the company posting its fastest revenue growth in the past four years in 2023.
Huawei was placed on a US trade-restricted list in 2019 over concerns it may be spying on Americans, meaning its suppliers must get special, hard-to-obtain licenses before shipping.
But policies put in place by the Trump administration have given Huawei access to a much broader range of items than is typical for a publicly traded company, and its suppliers have obtained billions of dollars’ worth of licenses to sell the company’s products and technology.
The summary also noted that from 2018 through 2023, officials approved licenses worth $335 billion out of a total of $880 billion in applications seeking licenses to sell to Chinese parties on the Entity List. Of those approvals, $222 billion worth were approved in 2021, President Biden’s first year in office, out of $560 billion in applications received that year, the officials added.
