Huawei pleaded innocent for a conspiracy and a racketeering indictment against U.S. prosecutors presented in February. Appearing in a New York court earlier this week, Chinese conglomerate officials said the “unfair” charges were false.
Racket, corporate espionage and the conspiracy to commit the two are just the latest additions to Huawei’s dizzyingly long list of charges in the United States.
The DOJ says it can prove more than two decades of IP theft from Huawei. The criminal proceedings which are currently progressing have not yet given rise to an assessment of concrete victims. Either way, the robot theft dispute Huawei settled with T-Mobile in 2017 and the 15-year-old Cisco router violation trial are part of the prosecution’s case.
Just like before, Huawei continues to claim that Washington is targeting because of geopolitical interests threatened by its rapidly growing commercial and technological breakthroughs. On the other side of the conflict, U.S. officials still describe Huawei as a relentless violator of all regulations under the sun.
The current situation has effectively nullified Huawei’s ambitions to provide 5G infrastructure in North America. The current China-United States. economic tensions do little to alleviate the situation. Trade negotiations or not, the Trump administration still seems disinterested in negotiating Huawei’s unenviable position with Beijing.
The fact that Huawei’s CFO has been under house arrest in Canada since the end of 2018 underlines that this stallmate is accused. The DOJ accused Meng Wanzhou of orchestrating many of the conglomerate’s alleged crimes against foreign rivals. The Huawei founder’s daughter has since fought against an American extradition request from her home in Vancouver.
Huawei’s case: innocent until charged
The Shenzen-based tech giant has historically had troubling relationships with the U.S. government and U.S. businesses. Its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and its numerous intellectual property disputes in the West have caused much of this hostility.
A Capitol Hill legislative initiative has already crippled Huawei’s supply chain, both in terms of hardware and software. This decision was particularly detrimental to the consumer electronics division of the conglomerate. In the absence of other options, the company began to invest in its own ecosystem of mobile applications intended to compete with that of Google. While the effort is still around Android, Huawei could also replace the ubiquitous Google OS in the long term.
The juggernaut has already confirmed that it was developing a new mobile operating system in 2018. It was before he even lost his Google Mobile Services license. Regardless of how Huawei’s conflict with state authorities develops, there is no doubt that its Western ambitions will continue to suffer.
