Things have got really difficult for Huawei
over the last few months,
but the situation's actually been
building up for many years.
Huawei is a big Chinese company.
It's probably best known in the West
for making mobile phones,
but it's also a massive telecommunications equipment firm.
Around 2012, a US intelligence committee
warned that Huawei and other Chinese companies
might have the power to spy on US communications
because they provide a sort of
core network kit that's available.
If you fast forward to 2018,
there were all these intelligence chiefs
that gave evidence in the US
and sort of suggested that maybe
people shouldn't really trust Huawei
and, again, other Chinese companies,
and they even suggested that
you shouldn't use Huawei phones.
They didn't really explicitly state why,
but the suggestion is essentially that
these phones might let the Chinese government spy on you.
The Canadian government arrested Huawei's
chief financial officer, who's a lady called Meng Wanzhou.
She was passing through Canada in December
and was arrested at the request of the US authorities,
and now she's sort of awaiting
potential extradition to the US.
She's facing charges over Huawei
potentially illegally doing business with Iran,
which is forbidden under US sanctions.
There's also a lot of other charges around
whether Huawei may have
stolen trade secrets from US tech companies.
So the picture's quite complicated at the moment,
but suffice to say that Huawei's reputation globally
is taking a bit of a dent.
Huawei has become a lot more aggressive
about defending its reputation
against accusations of spying.
It's now launched a lawsuit against the US government
where it says it's being treated unfairly
and that the US government doesn't have any proof
that it might spy on behalf of the Chinese government.
They're coming back very robustly in this lawsuit.
Huawei is massively popular in China,
predominantly because of its smartphones.
It is the biggest phone maker in China.
About one in every five smartphones
sold in China is a Huawei phone,
and that compares to about one in nine
smartphones for Apple's.
Huawei in 2018 had, or said it had, agreements
with two carrier partners in the US,
that means two mobile networks
who would sell Huawei devices,
and this is kind of important
because lots of people in the US
tend to buy their phones through a carrier.
And then in the run-up to the launch of the Mate 10 in 2018,
which was really this big flagship phone,
both carriers seemed to renege
on that agreement with Huawei,
and Huawei was left without any carrier partners in the US.
So Huawei phones are very much still available
for people to buy even if you are in the US,
but, obviously, it is much tougher
to buy a Huawei device if you are in the US,
but, you know, if you're in Europe
or many other countries around the world,
you can still get ahold of a Huawei device.
Having said that, if they were to
totally disappear from the market,
it would be a bit of a shame
because clearly they're a really,
really popular smartphone maker.
They're the second biggest in the world after Samsung,
and so if Huawei phones were to just
disappear off the shelves around the world,
there'd be a big chunk of people who would be unhappy.
The US has taken action against Huawei.
It's effectively locked Huawei out of its 5G networks.
It's pressuring its allies and other governments
to also do the same thing
and lock Huawei out of their 5G network.
There are some concrete developments that we're waiting for.
So one is Huawei's chief financial officer,
Meng Wanzhou, is currently in Canada,
and the US requested to extradite her
to face trial in the US. That could be a big trial.
It'll be a really big deal in terms of
proving the US' case against Huawei.
Another development is that the UK
is currently working on a report
about whether Huawei's equipment
is trustworthy in mobile networks.
Obviously, the UK is a key ally of the US,
and so if the UK decides, actually, Huawei is trustworthy,
that would be potentially a big upset.
Even if it decides Huawei isn't trustworthy,
that will also be a big upset
because Huawei's equipment is present
in many British networks.
And so there are a few things in 2019
that could really sort of swing Huawei's fate
and what the public feel about Huawei.
So something that's important to remember
is that the US hasn't offered an awful lot of proof
that Huawei may be using its equipment
to spy on people on behalf of the Chinese government.
That's not to say the US is compelled to provide that proof.
You know, it may have evidence that's secret,
but it's sort of important to know
that the public doesn't have a lot of information
at its disposal when it comes to deciding
whether to trust Huawei or not.
There's a worry that Huawei,
being one of the most successful Chinese companies there is,
must have ties to the Chinese government
because it's very difficult to become
a very large, very successful company in China
without some sort of connections to the government.
The ties between private enterprise and government
are much closer in China
than they might be in another country.
And so, there's a sense that maybe
Huawei wouldn't be able to resist
if the Chinese government forced it to spy
on foreign citizens on its behalf,
even if Huawei wanted to resist.
Huawei has pretty consistently denied
that it does anything wrong.
It's denied that it spies
on behalf of the Chinese government.
It also points out that in some countries,
such as the UK, it actually allows UK intelligence here
to sort of test out its equipment for flaws.
So it says it is being transparent,
that it does show that it's trustworthy.
It also says that its equipment is actually key
to the development of new networks like 5G networks
and that locking it out of the 5G market
is probably not a very good idea
because it kinda makes the whole process less competitive.
I think given the number of years
that US politicians and other intelligence officials
have been warning about Huawei,
it's hard to see why anything would change
around Huawei in the near future
and it will suddenly have access to the US market.
It's possible that a new president may change things,
but it seems unlikely given these issues
around Huawei and China precede Donald Trump.
And so it's very difficult to see
how the situation will change.
And actually, I think Huawei is gonna be
dealing with these issues with the US
perhaps for several years to come.